^ s 



THE 



VICKERS AND PURCELL 



CONTROVERSY. 



RESPECTFULLY PRESENTED TO ALL THK LOVERS OF TRUTH, 
BY 

JOHN B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati, 



PUBLISHED FOB THE BENEFIT OF MOUNT ST. MABY'S SEMINABT OF THE WEST. 




BENZIGER BROTHERS, 

PRINTEBS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE. 

CINCINNATI AND NEW YORK. 

1868. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by 

BENZIGER BROTHERS, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the 
Southern District of Ohio. 



PEEFACE. 



The Rev. Thomas Vickers having, for reasons which 
need not be told, failed to carry out his printed pro- 
gramme of evening lectures in Hopkins' Hall, for the 
continuance whereof I had waited in vain for several 
weeks, I now publish, according to promise, my edition 
of the Controversy. 

Notwithstanding the many interruptions to which I 
was subjected in writing my Letters, by absence from 
home and arduous ministerial duty, I am constrained 
to say that, in reviewing those Letters, I can not dis- 
cover any thing that requires retraction, emendation, 
or excuse for having been incorrectly stated, or incau- 
tiously advanced. On the other hand, I have learned 
to appreciate more fully the utter shipwreck which Mr. 
Vickers has made of Christian faith — if he ever had 
such faith ; for in a sermon by him published, I know 
not how long ago, in the Cincinnati Commercial, of 
which a slip is now before me, I see that he presents 
"Queries to the Orthodox Churches " — "No personal 
Deity in the Universe " — "Angels and Devils Antedi- 
luvian Monsters" — "Rejection of Miracles" — "Science 
proves that Man needs no Saving." To these impieties 

(iii) 



IV PREFACE. 

he adds scoffs at the inutility, the absurdity of prayer. 
We now more clearly understand why, after denying 
the personality of God, he calls Christ, who teaches the 
duty and efficacy of prayer, a "Theological fiction," and 
the Bible, which inculcates the same salutary and con- 
soling truth, " a Crutch." What justice could the Cath- 
olic Church, or any of the so-called orthodox denomina- 
nations expect or receive at the hands of such a man ? 

After this introduction to the irreligious character of 
Mr. Vickers, for which we are indebted to himself, and 
not another, I now call the reader's attention to some 
of his misstatements of facts: When asked by me who 
had chosen him to offer the sympathy of the American 
population of Cincinnati to the St. John's Society, he re- 
plies (p. 95*), "Did I not say expressly, in my sermon 
of October 13th, that I had been chosen by the St. 
John's Society?" The sermon is under my eyes, and 
I can not — nor can any one — see in it those words. 
What we do read, in the opening sentence, is this: 
"Rev. Thomas Vickers, of the First Congregational 
Society, began by saying that he had been chosen to 
express the sympathy," etc. He does not say by whom 
chosen ; and it would have been simply absurd to say 
he had been chosen by the Society itself to present to 
it the sympathy of the American population ! 

On pp. 38* and 79,* he is compelled to eat his own 
words and Mr. Mohr's about the quotation from Aqui- 
nas : "I did not pretend to give the exact words;" 
"Aquinas did not specify the method by which here- 
tics were to be exterminated." On p. 80,* he says he 

* Rev. Mr. Vickers' pamphlet. 



PREFACE. V 

showed me that Molkenbuhr was "an idiot." He had 
not so much as used the word, much less proved that 
it was applicable to that writer. After such exhibitions 
of the utter recklessness of Mr. Vickers' assertions, it 
were a loss of time to show how he mistakes Bouvier 
de Matrimonii); but I owe it to the readers of this Con- 
troversy to say that my position with regard to Firmilian 
is exactly as I have stated. In a matter of criticism, 
I am freethinker enough to bow to no man's judgment 
unless supported by arguments that seem to me satis- 
factory. — " Nullius addictus jurare in verba Magistri." 
For the learning of the late Archbishop Kenrick I have 
always entertained the highest respect ; but on more than 
one occasion I have been compelled to differ from him. 
Archbishop Tizzani, a living writer, and one of the most 
learned professors of the College of the Sapienza, Rome, 
goes farther than I have ventured, to declare the letter 
of Firmilian a forgery. The Greek-pretended original 
was never produced. " The Latin translation," says the 
last number of the Dublin Review, " was attributed gra- 
tuitously to St. Cyprian. From beginning to end it has 
the marks of Donatist manufacture about it." The learned 
and Most Rev. Professor may not have succeeded in his 
impeachment of all the other documents connected with 
the Cyprianic argument, but in this I claim the right to 
say he has succeeded perfectly. 

In my Pastoral Letter, any one who takes up the Pope's 
Encyclical and Syllabus, as republished and translated 
by Mr. Vickers, and places them in parallel columns with 
the Pastoral, will see that I have frankly, squarely, hon- 
estly avowed my adhesion to Circular and Syllabus ; and 



VI PREFACE. 

I avow further, that neither contains a single proposition 
but what I can plainly and fearlessly accept as a Cis-mon- 
tanist, or an Ultramontanist, a Catholic, or an American 
citizen. 

In Mr. Vickers' edition of the Controversy, he has in- 
troduced a sermon which he preached on the words of 
St. Paul: "Always learning." (2 Tim. iii: 7.) The 
sermon is the persiflage of the inspired apostle by a 
grinning satyr. St. Paul teaches that all necessary sav- 
ing truth, religious truth, was brought us from Heaven 
by Jesus Christ, the "Author and Finisher of our faith." 
Mr. Vickers denies that Christ has done any such thing. 
According to him, we must not believe that we have at- 
tained all truth in any thing. We must always be un- 
learning as well as learning. What we know T to-day for 
truth, he evidently supposes we may discover to be false- 
hood to-morrow. We can not be sure of the demonstra- 
tions of any of the propositions or theorems of Euclid, any 
more than of any of the revelations of heaven ; and in 
propounding this theory, he calumniates the Church, and 
seeks to stultify his dupes by telling them she claims to 
have arrived at the last results, the ne plus ultra, the Ul- 
tima Thule of science. It is thus the Church is rewarded 
for having, from her very first institution, daily advanced 
the horizon of science. She does not claim to have reached 
the last results in astronomy, chemistry, natural phi- 
losophy, botany, geology, or any other science : all she 
claims is that God has intrusted to her the deposit of 
faith; that he has commissioned her to teach it to all 
nations to the end of time, he himself preserving her 
from error, and guiding her unto all truth. She claims 



PREFACE. Vll 

that the God of revelation is the God of science also ; 
that these two, proceeding from the same divine source, 
can never be contradictory; and that the pioneers of 
science, the explorers of nature, the authors of great 
inventions, must not pretend that their discoveries au- 
thorize them to give the lie to God, or to the Bible. In 
a word, that there is as much truth as w 7 it and ridicule of 
science, falsely so-called, in the practical joke played on 
a club of infidel geologists by the Pickwickian Christian 
who sent them a square post of stone, four or five feet in 
height, dug up, or pretended to have been — which is the 
same thing — from a depth of forty or fifty feet, like a 
bone of a megalotherion, or a mastodon, with an inscrip- 
tion, which he charged them to interpret, but which puz- 
zled them for days. At last a peasant, who was in the 
Christian's secret, happened into the club-room, and, after 
listening for awhile to the discussions, remarked to the 
laughers at Genesis, they must be a pack of dunces for 
not seeing the interpretation at once. " Well," they re- 
plied, " we suppose you are not a dunce ; can you explain 
it ? " "I can," said he ; " and so can you, if you divide 
the syllables of the inscription aright. Do you not see 
it is ' Forassestorubon ' " (For asses to rub on). 

In concluding this preface, we would intimate to Rev. 
Mr. Vickers, that as they are the same sun and moon that 
enlightened the earth on the day of creation — and they 
are nothing the worse for age — that enlighten it now, so 
they are the same truths, revealed by Jesus Christ at the 
origin of Christianity, that enlighten our religious firma- 
ment to-day, and that they, like God, are not affected by 
years. We would not change for new ones. Let any 



Vlll PREFACE. 

unbeliever make a new sun and moon before pretending 
to make for the world a new religion. 

Finally, let Mr. Vickers tell us who the Catholics are 
who are not allowed to read the Bible, or we shall think 
he stated what was false — which would be unpleasant. 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

1. Sermon of Rev. Thomas Vickers, at the Laying of the 

Corner-Stone of St. John's Church 11 

2. Sermon of Archbishop Purcell at the Blessing of the 

Corner-Stone of St. Rose's Church 18 

3. Sermon of Rev. Mr. Vickers in reply to Archbishop 

Purcell 24 

4. Reply of Archbishop Purcell to Rev. Mr. Vickers 40 

5. Reply of Rev. Mr. Vickers to Archbishop Purcell 50 

6. Archbishop Purcell' s Reply to Rev. Mr. Vickers.. 62 

7. Letter of Rev. Mr. Vickers to Archbishop Purcell 80 

8. Letter of Archbishop Purcell to Rev. Mr. Vickers 91 

9. Reply of Rev. Mr. Vickers 102 

10. Second Letter of Archbishop Purcell to Rev. Mr. Vick- 

ers 115 

11. Rev. Mr. Vickers' Reply 127 

12. The Archbishop's Reply to the foregoing 150 

13. Rogues' Gallery 163 

14. Review of Rev. Mr. Vickers' First Lecture at Hopkins' 

Hall. Subject:— "Arnold of Brescia" 164 

15. Review of Rev. Mr. Vickers' Second Lecture at Hopkins' 

Hall. Subject:— "Wycliffe" 170 

16. Review of Rev. Mr. Vickers' Third Lecture at Hopkins' 

Hall. Subject:— "John Huss" 174 

17. Rev. Thomas Vickers 184 

18. Review of Rev. Mr. Vickers' Fourth Lecture' at Hopkins' 

Hall. Subject: — " Guttenberg," Savonarola 186 

19. Review of Mr. Vickers' Sermons 194 

20. Dixon the Catholic Church 198 



THE VICKERS AND PURCELL 
CONTROVERSY. 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS, 

AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE OF ST. JOHN'S 
GERMAN PROTESTANT CHURCH OF CINCINNATI. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Commercial, September 30, 1867.) 

Rev. Thomas Vickers, of the First Congregational 
Society, began by saying that he had been chosen to 
express the sympathy of the American population of 
our city with the occasion. He had been announced to 
make a speech in the English language, but he saw such 
a sea of German faces around him that he could not re- 
frain from addressing the assembly in the German lan- 
guage. Nothing separated men from each other so 
much as a difference of language. Mountains, rivers, 
deserts, or seas, were not so great a barrier between the 
nations, as a difference in the mother tongue. He there- 
fore begged leave, although not a German, or of German 
origin, to make his speech in the German language. 
The following is a translation of his remarks : 

" Dear Friends : This is a solemn and inspiring oc- 
casion. We are met together for the purpose of cele- 

(11) 



12 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

brating one of the most solemn acts of worship in which 
the modern world can participate — in order, in the 
name of God and humanity, for the spiritual advantage 
and improvement of the community in which we live, 
as a representation and illustration of the indissoluble 
union between the temporal and the eternal, between 
heaven and earth, between the deity and humanity, to 
lay the foundation-stone of a new temple of religion. 
Yes, it is indeed an inspiring thought, that in the midst 
of the hurry and impatience of the modern world, in 
the midst of the noise and press of business, the con- 
flict of material interests, in spite of the pleasure-seek- 
ing and superficial spirit of the age, in spite of a soul- 
less and heartless materialism, such acts of worship are 
still possible, such temples can still be built; in short, 
that there are still men who have a heart and sense for 
religion, for whom there is still something higher and 
nobler than their daily bread and their daily pleasure ; 
something which is more lasting and more consolatory 
than all the riches and all the honor in the world. 

"There are, indeed, others, who have not been swal- 
lowed up in the maelstrom of modern life, who take an 
interest in purely spiritual things : and they also build 
temples, temples of art and science, but temples of re- 
ligion they despise. For them, religion is a thing of 
the past, a legend of times long gone by, no longer a 
living truth. It is sad that there are people enough of 
this sort, and will be for a long time to come. But they 
exist, to the shame and disgrace of the Church. They 
are a living witness to the hollo wn ess and degradation 
of ecclesiastical Christianity, to the contradiction, now 
patent to every man of sense, between the old fables of 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 13 

the middle ages and the grand spiritual acquisitions of 
the modern world. 

"Let us not quarrel with those who have turned 
away with disgust from the silliness and stupidity of the 
Church, with fright and horror from her spiritual empti- 
ness. Let us rather seek to abate the evil — to improve 
our own spiritual status. 

" Almost all the nations of antiquity regarded the 
holy places, the temples which were consecrated to the 
service of the gods, as at the same time places of refuge, 
to which the oppressed could flee and feel themselves 
secure from the persecution of their enemies. Had a 
slave run away from the ill-treatment of his master, did 
a conquered warrior wish to escape the vengeance of his 
enemy, or one accused before the courts w T ish to flee the 
threatened penalty of the law — the door of the temple 
was always open, and he who succeeded in reaching 
this was, from that moment, under the especial protec- 
tion of the deity. He whose boldness and impudence 
led him to pursue his victim thus far, to do him any 
injury whatever in this sacred place, or to tear him away 
from its protection, was guilty of the highest, the most 
abominable crime against God and man. 

"This custom, which was of heathen origin, was after- 
ward transferred to Christianity. Under the reign of 
Constantine the Great, the Christian churches were al- 
ready regarded as places of refuge for all who desired 
protection, and in the year 431, and Theodosius II, this 
privilege was extended to all the courts, passages, gar- 
dens, and houses belonging to the domain of the several 
churches. In the following centuries, the ecclesiastical 
councils extended this right of the Church still further. 



14 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Of course this privilege led to great abuses, not only 
among the heathen, but also among the Christians; 
therefore came gradually into disuse, and was finally 
formally abrogated. 

"But this custom had, nevertheless, a profound and 
noble meaning ; there was a true thought at the bottom 
of this rather rude manifestation. Somewhere on earth 
a place was necessary where, in the hour of his utmost 
need, man could feel himself secure from the violence 
of his fellow-men. Neither in the antique States nor 
in the middle ages could the State, as such, afford this 
protection. This was possible only to God, or, in other 
words, to the Church. But in this, as in so many other 
things, modern civilization brought changes. The State 
was obliged to assert its prerogative in opposition to the 
Church ; civil law developed itself; it assumed, as a 
matter of course, the protection of men against mere 
physical violence; and thus the ecclesiastical right of 
refuge, in its traditional form, disappeared. 

" But it is not the mission of progressive knowledge 
to destroy the spiritual essence of supernatural forms, 
but rather to preserve it. And, my friends, the time 
seems to have come when we ought to inquire whether, 
for the modern world, this old ecclesiastical privilege has 
lost all meaning and significance. Is there no noble 
sense in which the Church of to-day can be an asylum, 
a place of refuge. I answer confidently, there is a sense 
in which the Church not only can but must be such a 
place of refuge, if she will not dig her own grave and 
vanish from the earth; the Church ought to be, and 
must be, a place of refuge for free thought — a place of 
refuge, a home for the spirit. Hitherto she has never 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 15 

been this. Every thing else has been protected except 
free thought. Every thing else has found a refuge in the 
Church, except free thought. Free thought is the only 
thing which the Church has never tolerated. Thought 
she has never tolerated at all, for thought is, in its es- 
sence, free, and can not be enslaved; where slavery is, 
there free thought is not, and can not be. 

" There was, indeed, a time in which the Church was 
the home of all culture and all knowledge, in which the 
old heroes of science and philosophy, when the night of 
barbarism fell upon them, took refuge in the monas- 
teries, in the cells of the monks. But how was it pos- 
sible that they could feel themselves at home in such 
company? As one, in crossing the Alps, gladly takes 
refuge in the friendly hospice while the storm rages 
without, and does not scorn to pass an hour in conver- 
sation with its well-fed monks, who, however, seldom 
betray any appreciation of that which lies beyond their 
limited circle of vision, and consequently makes it easy 
to part from them, so those old spiritual heroes of 
Greek and Roman antiquity spent the night of the 
1 Dark Ages ' with the monks of the Catholic Church, 
chatted with them now and then, but wisely kept their 
own counsel in regard to all problems of a more pro- 
found nature, and with the first dawn of the new morn- 
ing, joyfully w T ent their way toward a more congenial 
companionship. To drop the metaphor, the Church was 
for centuries almost the only representative of science 
and culture, but the world has, after all, little to thank 
her for, except the preservation and transmission of the 
spiritual treasures of antiquity. It was never possible 
for the mind to develop itself under her dominion; 



16 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

wherever free thought attempted to show itself it was 
immediately crushed out. There was plenty of dead 
erudition, but living investigation and freethinking — 
none at all. It is true, that, as the new era began to 
dawn, the Church founded numerous universities, but 
not for the purpose of free mental development, such as 
we now demand, but for the purpose of training spiritual 
prize-fighters, whose mission was to defend the dogmas 
of the Church and to increase the authority of the 
clergy. Just as soon as such a one began to think for 
himself she led him to the stake. 

"So it has been, my friends, and so it has remained, 
down to the present hour. The Church, as such, whether 
she be Koman Catholic or Protestant, has undergone no 
essential change in this respect. To her, free thought 
and free investigation are just as heretical as ever they 
were. But free thought has taken bloody vengeance 
upon her. To-day she is forsaken of all thinkers; she 
is the object of mockery and contempt. She has ban- 
ished free thought from her hearth-stone, and while it 
goes on conquering and to conquer, subjecting the whole 
world to its rule, she herself has become a prey to the 
rats and mice of history. Well for her, if even in this, 
'the eleventh hour,' she repent and mend her ways. 
She must become the asylum, the home of free thought. 
It is only in the distant future, if at all, that she can 
become again, and in reality, the representative of all 
knowledge and culture. For the present her mission is 
to become the mirror of the scientific knowledge of our 
time ; she must appropriate to herself whatever facts of 
science, history, and criticism the modern age has to 
offer her. She must digest them, and reproduce them 



. SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICRERS. 17 

unalloyed. She must 'stoop to conquer;' she must 
learn of the world in order to win it for herself. 

"And, finally, my friends, as it is the mission of every 
living ecclesiastical community to reconcile modern sci- 
ence and modern consciousness to religion, to mediate 
between Church and civilization, so, as a German church, 
on American soil, it is your especial mission, so far as it 
lies in your power, to procure for German civilization — 
and by that I mean German scientific culture and Ger- 
man depth of thought and feeling — its proper acknowl- 
edgment and its rightful influence in this your adopted 
home. And to this end I, as the only representative 
on this platform of the Anglo-American part of our 
population, offer you my hand and heart. Let us, then, 
in the expectation of a new era of spiritual freedom, 
and with the resolution to work for it, lay the corner- 
stone of this new temple of the religion of the spirit, 
and may the blessing of God rest upon it." 



18 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



SERMON OF ARCHBISHOP PURCELL, 

AT THE BLESSING OF THE CORNER-STONE OF ST. ROSE'S 
CHURCH. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, October 9, 1867.) 

[The corner-stone of St. Rose's German Catholic Church, of this 
city, was blessed by Archbishop Purcell, on Sunday, October 6, 18(37, 
on which occasion he delivered the following sermon :] 

Beloved Brethren: At the close of the interest- 
ing ceremonies which you have just witnessed, permit 
me to direct your attention for a few moments to the 
utterances of a Congregational minister, at the laying 
of the corner-stone of the St. John's German Protestant 
Church, in this city, on the 29th of September. 

The reverend gentleman to whom I allude, is reported 
in one of our city papers, of the 30th ult., to have, as 
it seems to me, and as I think it will to you, involved 
himself in palpable contradictions, to have stated as 
truisms what I can not help regarding as glaring mis- 
statements ; and to have wantonly and gratuitously in- 
sulted the church organization to which he volunteered 
to speak the sympathy of our American population. 

The contradiction is this : In one place he tells us 
there was indeed a time in which the Church was the 
home of all culture and all knowledge, in which the old 
heroes of science and philosophy, when the night of bar- 



SERMON OF ARCHBISHOP PTJRCELL. 19 

barism fell upon them, took refuge. Now, without stop- 
ping to inquire of the gentleman who these old heroes 
were, whence they had come, and when or by w T hom 
they had been educated — questions which we well know 
he would be puzzled to answer — I shall only ask him how 
this all culture and all knowledge existed in the Church 
where he falsely asserts free thought was never tolerated ? 
Thought is essentially free. God made it free, and no 
tyrant, no power can chain it, neither the power of God, 
who wills it free, nor the power of man, who can not 
deprive it of its freedom. How T , then, could the Church 
enslave it, or how could she have been the home of all 
culture and all knowledge if she had enslaved it ? Then, 
de jure et de facto, the statement of Rev. Mr. Vickers is 
false, and in making it he involves himself in a palpa- 
ble contradiction. The Church, he says again, was for 
centuries almost the only representative of science and 
culture, and in the same breath he pretends to say that 
she crushed free thought wherever it appeared. Now, 
was there no free thought illustrated, none exercised 
by the admirable apologists of Christianity, Tertullian, 
Justin Martyr, Lactantius, Augustin, Chrysostom, Cy- 
prian, Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Christopher Colum- 
bus, compared to whom it is no disparagement to Mr. 
Vickers to say he is a mental pigmy. Were not the 
martyrs of religion at the same time martyrs of free 
thought when they nobly dared to speak the truth be- 
fore the tribunals of paganism, the fasces of the consuls, 
the roaring of the wild beasts, and the crackling of 
flames in the amphitheaters? And all these were the 
obedient children of a Church w T hich put an extinguisher 
on freedom of thought! Credat — M. Vickers. When 



20 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

men chose to use their freedom to err she did not, and 
she could not hinder them. Arius, Macedonius, Pe- 
lagius, Manes, Origen, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Beza, 
and all the heresiarchs, who fell like withered branches 
from the tree of life during the long lapse of ages, were 
not led by her to the stake, any more than Servetus, or 
the New England witches were, nor did she gather them 
for an Auto dafe. 

The world, he says, has little to thank the Church for 
but the preservation and transmission of the spiritual 
treasures of antiquity. Well, we incline to think this 
was a great deal. But will the gentleman deign to in- 
form us who it was that fought the great battle with 
paganism, Mohammedanism, and barbarism, and won 
it? Was it not the Church? And for this have we 
not to thank her? Will he tell us of a single nation 
on the face of the globe, that was converted from idol- 
atry to Jesus Christ except by a missionary of the Cath- 
olic Church ? And if this is so, have we not something 
else — have we not a great deal to thank her for — be- 
side the preservation and transmission of the spiritual 
treasures of antiquity? 

The Church, says her reverend reviler, founded nu- 
merous universities, but not for the purpose of free 
mental development, such as we now demand, but for 
the training of spiritual prize-fighters, whose mission 
was to defend the dogmas of the Church, etc. Well, 
for what mission or purpose did Christ found the col- 
lege of the apostles and send them forth when well 
trained by him ; was it not to be spiritual prize-fighters? 
Was it not to tolerate no pagan vice or error? Was 
it not to beat down every height and might that exalteth 



SERMON OF ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 21 

itself against the knowledge of God, and to bring every 
understanding — pagan freethinkers who were free from 
thinking aright — to the obedience of Christ? (2 Cor. 
x : 5.) Did not Jesus Christ say, that whoever refused 
to hear the Church should be reputed as a heathen and 
a publican? (Matt, xviii: 17.) Does he not charge 
his apostles not to teach more, or less, or otherwise than 
he had commanded them? (Matt, xxiii: 20.) With 
these, and sundry other similar texts, staring him in 
the face, will Mr. Vickers have the hardihood to ar- 
raign Jesus Christ of intolerance for interdicting free 
thought? It is God's truth and not man's thinking that 
makes men truly free. Did not St. Paul interdict free- 
dom of thought and freedom of speech in those against 
whom he charged his disciple Timothy for having gone 
astray and turned to vain talkiug, desiring to be teach- 
ers of the law, not understanding what they say, or 
whereof they affirm ? (1 Tim. i : 6, 7.) Did St. Paul 
stand up for the freethinking of those who, when they 
knew God, did not glorify him as such, but became 
foolish in their thoughts, and their senseless hearts were 
darkened; for saying they were wise, they became fools. 
(Rom. i: 21, 22.) The Catholic universities, then, 
would have been repudiated by Jesus Christ, if instead 
of keeping and guarding faithfully " the form of sound 
words," they had, under pretext of allowing freethink- 
ing, permitted Gospel truths to be denied, and the name 
of Christ blasphemed, and his holy religion itself oblit- 
erated from a world which he had brought it from 
heaven to redeem. No, Christians, the Church leaves 
to the human mind all needful liberty. She refuses it 
none but what is " a cloak for malice." 



22 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

She gives it a charter like that of the ocean, to roll 
its mountain billows as it listeth, but she sets it at the 
same time a barrier from which its proud swelling waves 
must retire. The Church, says Mr. Vickers, whether 
she be Catholic or Protestant — take heed to this compli- 
ment, reverend pastors and people of St. John's and other 
Protestant organizations of Cincinnati — the Church, 
whether Catholic or Protestant — Mr. Vickers is hap- 
pily of neither, he is a freethinking Congregational- 
ist — has undergone no essential change in this respect. 
To her free thought and free investigation are just as 
heretical as ever they were. And for this she has be- 
come a prey to the rats and mice of history. Whether 
this be true or not of Protestantism, Mr. Vickers may 
be the best judge; but even if he were one of the nox- 
ious little animals, he should know by this time, at 
least, that though they may gnaw a parchment, the 
foundations of the Catholic Church are too deep, her 
walls too massive, her battlements too divinely guarded 
to be in the slightest danger from such sappers and 
miners. But as for us Catholics, w T ho are the children 
of the saints, and who look for that life which God will 
give to those who never change their faith from him, 
we place, adjust, and bless this corner-stone, not for a 
tower of Babel, for which the speech we have reviewed 
might be appropriate, but for a Christian temple. AVe 
place, adjust, and bless it, not for freethinking, free- 
talking, free-loving, free any thing, but in the name of 
the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, that true 
faith may flourish here with the wholesome fear of God 
and brotherly love; that it may be a house of prayer, 
that the name of the Lord Jesus Christ may be invoked 



SERMON OF ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 23 

and praised, and his holy sacraments administered in 
it ; in a word, that a mystic ladder — such as the patri- 
arch beheld in his dream in the wilderness — may be es- 
tablished here, on which the angels of God may descend 
and ascend, bringing down his blessings from heaven to 
earth, and taking back the homage of loving, believing 
grateful hearts to him, the Father of lights, from w T hom 
every good and perfect gift, with true religion, comes 
down to men. 



24 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



A SERMON BY REV. THOMAS VICKERS, 

IN REPLY TO ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Gazette, October 14, 1S67.) 

Text.— And they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like unto 
the beast? who is able to make war with him?— Rev. xiii: 4. 

Dear Friends : I ought, perhaps, by way of intro- 
duction to what I have to say to you this morning, to 
state briefly the occasion of my sermon. It is known 
to you that I was invited by the St. John's German 
Protestant Society, of this city, to participate in the 
ceremony of laying the corner-stone of their new church 
edifice. I felt bound by the importance of the occasion, 
by the fact that the St. John's Society stands committed 
to liberal Christianity, and by my own position as min- 
ister of the only church in our city which acknowl- 
edges no bonds of sect or creed, to utter my deepest 
convictions in regard to the mission of the living Church 
to the present age. In attempting to impress upon the 
minds of my hearers the precise nature of this mission, 
I could not very well help referring to the history of 
the Church in general, and to its present condition; 
and referring to it with this distinct object in view, I 
could not choose but run the risk of giving offense in 
Various directions. Not that I wished to offend any 
body — far from it; but you can never " tell the truth and 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 25 

shame the devil/' without the devil rising up against you 
and seeking to devour you. So it was in this case. I was 
obliged, by the truth of history, to say that the Church 
had hitherto tolerated every thing but thought — this 
she had never tolerated ; that she had been a sanctuary 
for every thing else, but wherever free thought had at- 
tempted to show itself, she had trampled it under foot. 
I asserted this of the Church in general, as an organized 
institution, making no exception in favor of any eccle- 
siastical body. It seems, however, that I committed a 
very grave offense in not excepting the Eoman Catholic 
Church from these charges. For this offense, Arch- 
bishop Purcell undertook, last Sunday, on the occasion 
of laying the corner-stone of St. Rose Church, to inflict 
upon me the only ecclesiastical punishment which, in 
our country, God be thanked, he or any other priest is 
permitted to administer — he preached a sermon against 
me. It is this sermon to which I intend to offer some 
reply to-day. 

I am bound to say, at the outset, that I have no per- 
sonal quarrel with Archbishop Purcell, no personal 
grievance to redress ; that were there no supreme issue 
at stake, no dangerous falsehood to unmask, no truth 
to defend, no point to be made in favor of the modern 
age and its spiritual needs as against the arrogance and 
despotism of a rotten ecclesiastical institution, I should 
gladly let all such archiepiscopal expectorations go un- 
noticed to that early oblivion to which the common 
sense of the age consigns them. I furthermore hold 
myself excused from replying to intellectual rowdyism 
in its own dialect. I leave such fine terms as " mental 
.pigmy," and " reverend reviler," and all such theolog- 



26 THE VICXERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

ical shillalahs, to those who, by education and breeding 
(or the want of these), are accustomed to their use. 

Now, that you understand the issue, let us proceed to 
the matter in hand. Let us see whether I involved 
myself in " palpable contradictions ;" whether I made 
charges in one breath which I virtually took back in the 
next. I admitted, on the one hand, that there had been 
a period in which the Church was the home of all culture 
and all knowledge, but asserted on the other, that free 
thought had never been tolerated within her borders — 
this is the alleged palpable contradiction. And there is, 
indeed, a contradiction here, but a very different one from 
that which the Archbishop meant to satirize — one which 
is the most biting satire upon the whole Roman Catholic 
institution. It does not require a very large measure of 
scholastic acumen to distinguish between a contradiction 
in the statement of facts, and a contradiction in the facts 
themselves; the one is a logical blunder, the other an 
historical one ; the one is generally, the cause of merri- 
ment at the stupidity of him who makes it, the other 
is the cause of great historical convulsions, the ruin of 
States, the downfall of dynasties, and the destruction of 
peoples. Take an example : it was the latter kind of 
contradiction — the contradiction between a republican 
form of government and the institution of slavery — 
which involved this country in a terrific war of four 
years' duration. It is the same contradiction, the con- 
flict between republicanism and slavery, which has just 
resulted in our own State in the momentary triumph 
of despotism, the refusal on no ground of intelligence, 
but simply on the ground of a difference in the color 
of the skin, to confer the rights of citizenship on a 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 27 

whole race of men who nobly bear its burdens. That is 
the kind of contradiction which, if not removed, will yet 
break this nation to atoms. And this is the kind of 
contradiction which my address, at the laying of the 
corner-stone of St. John's Church, intended to illus- 
trate — the contradiction was in the facts, and not in the 
statement. 

It is an old trick of the sophists to distract the at- 
tention of their hearers from the chief points at issue, 
by simply mentioning them, and then passing them by 
as of no consequence to the argument, while they devote 
all their forces either to the creation of false issues or 
to the refutation of that which is merely incidental. 
It is a fine sample of this sophistry when the Arch- 
bishop says he will not stop to inquire "who those old 
heroes of science and philosophy were," who, when the 
night of barbarism fell upon them, took refuge in the 
monasteries of the Catholic Church ; he will not stop to 
inquire "whence they had come, when or by whom 
they had been educated," for he assumes to know that 
these are questions which I should be "puzzled to an- 
swer." But this happens to be one of the points about 
which I must compel him to stop and inquire. The 
heroes to whom I referred were the poets, historians, 
and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. Is it 
any great task for a scholar to answer the question 
where these came from, when and by whom they were 
educated? Or did the Archbishop mean it to be un- 
derstood that the Roman Church educated them, men 
who lived centuries, some of them almost millenniums, 
before she came into existence ? To be sure, it would 
require no extraordinary display of archiepiscopal dia- 



28 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

lectics to maintain such a thesis, for the new dogma of 
the " immaculate conception " makes Jesus the cause of 
his own grandmother's having brought his mother into 
the world without due process of nature. 

But let us lay aside the metaphor entirely, and see 
what the plain facts of the case are. After the fall of 
the Roman Empire in the West, there was an almost 
universal loss of that learning which the Greeks and 
Romans had accumulated. For centuries taste and 
knowledge had been declining, but the eruption of the 
barbarian nations had put an end to them entirely. 
Up to this time there had been some show of learning 
and culture among the so-called Fathers of the Church, 
but even that died out. Outside the ecclesiastical or- 
der ignorance reigned supreme, but the knowledge found 
within it was scarcely worthy of the name. I repeat, 
there was a time when the Church was the home of all 
culture and all knowledge, but after all, this lamp of 
learning in the Church shed such a feeble and ineffect- 
ual light that it was scarcely distinguishable from the 
surrounding darkness. It was in the period known as 
the Dark Ages. The literary treasures of ancient 
Greece were stowed away in the monasteries, but the 
language in which they were written was almost en- 
tirely forgotten; not one in a hundred of so-called 
scholars could read them. Even the Latin, the official 
language of the Church, became so corrupt and barbar- 
ous that it could scarcely be called Latin any longer. 
Now and then there was one who read and copied an 
old author, or made extracts from the " Fathers " on 
points of Church doctrine, but thought, as such, was 
utterly out of the question. There was no inducement 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 29 

to think, the truth had been attained, and he who pre- 
sumed to question it was w r orse than a heathen. 

Archbishop Purcell asks, with an air of triumph, 
which no doubt had an immense effect on his peculiar 
audience, if there was " no free thought illustrated, 
none exercised by the admirable apologists of Christi- 
anity, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Lactantius, Augustin, 
Chrysostom, Cyprian, Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, 
Christopher Columbus, compared with whom it is no 
disparagement to Mr. Vickers to say he is a ' mental 
pigmy ? ' " I should like, in passing, to recall to the 
Archbishop's memory an old Latin proverb, which it 
would be well for him and his church to consider : Pig- 
mei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes 
vident (Pigmies standing on the shoulders of giants see 
further than the giants themselves). Now, in the first 
place, it is somewhat remarkable that he does not mention 
a single thinker who lived between the middle of the fifth 
century and the beginning of the thirteenth, so that 
there is a period of nearly eight centuries which seems 
to be pretty " dark" for him also. If the Archbishop 
had wanted to illustrate the ecclesiastical learning of 
this period, he could not have done it better than by 
referring to productions of a somewhat later date — 
the times were somewhat changed, but then, you know, 
the Church never changes. It would have been much 
to the point had he named those profound thinkers, 
those immaculate logicians and poets, Scherschleiferins, 
Dollenkopfins, Eitelnarrabianus, Mistladerins, and com- 
pany, who unfolded their heavenly wisdom (a little 
mixed up, it is true, with earthly sensuality and de- 
bauchery) in the Epistolw Obscurorum Virorum. 



30 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Columbus and Copernicus are the only ones he men- 
tions who belong to the modern world, and I have yet 
to learn that these are counted among the " apologists 
of Christianity." It was certainly a slip of the tongue 
which allowed these two names to pass the lips of the 
Archbishop; he probably meant to say Torquemada 
and Loyola, who, although not strictly apologists of 
Christianity, are much better examples of his kind of 
free thought than Columbus and Copernicus. 

But to what extent were the other representatives of 
free thought ? Time will not permit me to characterize 
them all ; but we will take a few examples. First of all, 
Tertullian, a fine specimen of a freethinker. In his book 
against the heretics he bellows forth: "Admit that 
they are not enemies of the truth, what have we to do 
with men who confess that they are still investigating. 
Since they are still seeking, they are not in possession 
of any thing ; and as they do not possess any thing, 
they do not believe, are not Christians. Nobis curiosi- 
tate opus non est post Christum, nee inquisltione post 
evangelium. Cum eredimus, nihil desideramus ultra ere- 
dere. (After Christ we have no need to desire to know 
any thing further, after the Gospel no need of inquiry. 
Since we believe, we desire nothing beyond belief.) 
What have Athens and Jerusalem, what the Academy 
and the Church, in common ? " This same Tertullian 
Avas one of the most blatant, foul-mouthed, and narrow- 
minded of all the so-called Fathers — the man who took 
a swinish pleasure in defiling the most sacred names of 
antiquity, as the Romish Church has always defiled 
those who disagreed with her. It is furthermore not 
unessential to mention, before leaving him, that he be- 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 31 

longed to a sect which was regarded as heretical and 
excommunicated by the main body of Christians, and 
that he never recognized the supremacy of the Roman 
Bishop. 

This brings me to Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who, 
however little of a freethinker he was, was far too free 
in one respect for Rome. He was the great champion 
of the unlimited power of each bishop in his own dio- 
cese, but a bitter opponent of Roman supremacy ; he 
recognized no episcopus episcoporum, and so Bishop 
Stephen, of Rome, cut off all intercourse with him, 
and he died in virtual excommunication. 

And now for St. Augustin : I take it for granted that 
whenever a man is capable of free thought and impar- 
tial investigation, he is not only willing to accord it to 
others, but desirous of doing so. And yet it is to this 
man above all others to whom the Romish Church looks 
for her authority to punish heretics. Embittered by his 
controversies with the Danatists, he was the first man in 
the Occident to elaborate a theory for compulsion in re- 
ligious matters for the persecution of heretics. All later 
defenders of the right of the Church to use violence do 
little more than repeat his arguments. And Thomas 
Aquinas is one of these. You would search in vain for 
the least vestige of independent thought in the w T hole 
three and twenty folios of his writings. His mission 
was to reduce the dogmas of the Church to the forms 
of the Aristotelian philosophy, so far as the philosophy 
was then understood. For the development of free 
thought there was not an inch of space. The outlines 
of the picture were all there ; it was his office so to put 
on the Aristotelic colors. But just as little liberty of 



32 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

thought as he himself enjoyed, just so much, and no more, 
he was willing to tolerate in others. " Heretics," said 
the Church, " are the sons of Satan, and, therefore, it is 
nothing but right that, even in this life, they should par- 
ticipate in the lot of their father — bum, as he does." 
And Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologian, the 
great text-book of Roman Catholic theology even at 
the present day, opposes to all biblical reasons for tol- 
eration or milder treatment the words of the apostle, 
that a heretic should be rejected after the second ad- 
monition, to which words he adds the commentary, that 
the best way of rejecting him is to execute him; and, fur- 
thermore, that, in the case of apostates, not even an 
admonition is necessary — these ought to be burned with- 
out further ceremony. (Summa i, 2, q. 11, art. 3-4.) Are 
not these men — with whose high-sounding names the 
Archbishop filled his mouth so full — are they not grand 
representatives of free thought? 

But let us return, for a moment, to Columbus and 
Copernicus, and ask what the "Holy Catholic Church" 
w r as doing while they were making their immortal dis- 
coveries in heaven and earth. Their lives cover a period 
of nearly a century, from about the middle of the fifteenth 
to the middle of the sixteenth. What a grand age it was ; 
the age in which Bartholomseus Diaz, Vasco de Gama, 
the Cabots, Vespucci, and Magellan discovered the earth ; 
the age when the fugitive Greeks brought the knowledge 
of the classics to Italy ; when the Humanists, Reuchlin, 
Erasmus, Hutten, and their compeers, began to combat 
the ignorance and stupidity of the monks, and Gutten- 
berg lent them his powerful aid ; the age in w T hich Ra- 
phael, Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Michael Angelo, 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 33 

achieved their glorious works; the age of Luther and 
Melancthon, Zwingli and Calvin ; in which they dealt 
such sturdy blows at an equally powerful and unscru- 
pulous hierarchy. What was it with which the Romish 
Church was chiefly occupied as the sun was painting 
the dawn of this new day of history with such magnifi- 
cent colors? Oh, she was trying her best to conjure 
back the night! She always loved darkness better than 
light. She was busy persecuting the Jews in Spain, 
whom she had forced to abjure their ancient faith, but 
still suspected of a secret allegiance to it. In a little 
over thirty years, ending with the year 1517, she had 
burned twelve thousand two hundred persons alive, and 
punished nearly two hundred thousand others in vari- 
ous ways, either by torture, imprisonment, loss of prop- 
erty, or all put together. She was issuing bulls against 
witchcraft, and sending her mercenaries into Germany 
to burn men, women, and children by thousands. She 
was selling indulgences to get money to build St. Peter's 
with — licenses to commit any sin whatever, and forgiv- 
eness for any that might have been committed — and all 
for money. She was burning Savonarola for his plain 
speech against her wickedness, as she had already burned 
John Huss and Jerome of Prague. She was attempting 
to annihilate the Hussites, as she had already massacred 
the Albigenses. She was founding the order of the Jes- 
uits and perfecting its organization — an order in which, 
in the service of the Church, men are reduced to ma- 
chines ; in which " obedience takes the place of every 
motive or affection that usually awakens men to activity ; 
obedience, absolute and unconditional, without thought 
or question as to its object/' 
3 



34 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Look for a moment at the Inquisition, which at this 
time was in its glory. What was its object, and what 
its method of procedure? 

Its object was the suppression of heresy in every form. 
It was an outgrowth of the theory that the Pope is lord 
over both the souls and the bodies of men. Every-where, 
where the Inquisition began its work, Papal law was pro- 
claimed, according to which every one was bound, under 
pain of excommunication, to reveal, within a definite 
period, every thing he knew of heretics or heretical ac- 
tions. This obligation was universal and unlimited; no 
human tie, neither marriage nor blood relationship, nor 
the duty of gratitude, afforded relief. Sons and daugh- 
ters were bound, in conscience, to denounce their own 
fathers and mothers, even if it were probable or certain 
that the rack and the stake would be their fate. He who 
failed to confess what he knew of others was treated as 
a heretic himself; on the other hand, indulgences were 
granted to all who contributed to the seizure and pun- 
ishment of heretics. He who acknowledged himself 
guilty, and recanted, suffered severe and ignominious 
punishment, often imprisonment for life; he who re- 
mained firm to his convictions was delivered over to 
the secular arm, with the mocking recommendation : ut 
quam element issime et extra sanguinis effusionem puniretur 
(that the punishment be as merciful as possible, and 
without effusion of blood). This was the atrocious for- 
mula for burning alive. The civil power had no choice; 
under pain of excommunication, the ecclesiastical ver- 
dict must be immediately carried into effect, and the 
victim burnt. Concerning the guilt or innocence of the 
condemned, the secular courts had nothing to say : their 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 35 

only office was that of the executioner. Even as late as 
the seventeenth century, one of the most distinguished 
doctors of canon law, Pignatelli, maintained that even 
if the secular authorities knew, with certainty, that a 
sentence was unjust, or rendered void by some flaw in 
the procedure, they must execute it, nevertheless. I 
have no heart to go further into the bloody record of 
the infernal institution. "Scarcely is it possible," ex- 
claimed Antonio dei Pagliarici, "to be a Christian, and 
die quietly in one's bed." 

Freedom of thought, indeed ! Why, in the very year 
in which Copernicus' immortal work on the Revolutions 
of the Heavenly Bodies was printed (1643), Cardinal 
Caraffa decreed that "no book whatever, whether new 
or old, and whatever its contents, should, for the future, 
be printed without permission from the inquisitors." 
And this stringent regulation was applied not only to 
publishers and booksellers, but even private persons 
w T ere required to denounce all forbidden books, to exert 
their utmost power to effect the destruction of all that 
came to their knowledge. This gradually gave rise to 
the Index of Prohibited Books, of which Paul Sarpi 
said: "Never will a more effectual means be discovered 
of making dunces of men, under the pretense of mak- 
ing them more pious." And here let me remind Arch- 
bishop Purcell that it was not until the year 1835 that 
the work of Copernicus was removed from the index 
librorum prohibitorum. Since that time I suppose the 
Romish Church allows the earth to turn on its axis and 
to revolve round the sun. 

With what brazen effrontery does the Archbishop, in 
the face of all the facts of history, say that, "When 



36 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

men chose to use their freedom to err, the Church did 
not, and could not hinder them." Does he think to 
gloss over the foul crimes of the Church by mentioning 
the names of half a dozen persons whom she did not 
burn? No thanks to her, methinks, that she did not 
burn Luther and the rest of them. 

It is the simple fact of history, without any exag- 
geration whatever, that the Romish Church has never, 
during the whole period of her history, tolerated free 
thought. Philosophy and science, in some sense of the 
terms, are an abomination to her. I need only to men- 
tion the names Abelard, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Gior- 
dano Bruno, Fenelon, Lamenais, Hermes, Guenther, 
Renan, to show you that through "the long lapse of 
ages" the Church does not change in this respect. Let 
me quote to you the words of the last philosophic vic- 
tim to Romish intolerance. Frohschammer, Roman 
Catholic Professor of Philosophy at the University of 
Munich, whose books and lectures have recently been 
interdicted, says: "The position of a Catholic author, 
who is in earnest with his science, does not merely re- 
hash the same old story, but has an eye to the needs 
of the age, is really pitiable. He is treated as an inno- 
vator, denounced, and, where it is possible, condemned. 
The work of his inspiration and toil is branded as anti- 
ecclesiastical, and his fellow-believers are forbidden, un- 
der pains and punishments, to read it. It is not to be 
wondered at when, in view of the proceedings of the 
Congregation of the Index, our opponents tell us, in 
bitter mockery, that Catholic men of learning have 
nothing to do but play the part of dumb dogs, and are 
fit for nothing but to be passive instruments of outward 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 37 

authority. That, under such circumstances, progress in 
science can not be thought of, is a matter of course." 
And yet Professor Frohschammer never dreamed of 
departing from the Catholic faith. Ah, yes, this is 
the "contradiction" which will yet break the Catholic 
Church in pieces. 

Either Archbishop Purcell has learnt his lesson very 
badly, or he consciously uttered, last Sunday, what he 
knew to be untrue. This is the only alternative. As 
the former supposition is the most charitable, I would 
respectfully recommend him to study carefully the En- 
cyclical Letter of the Pope, with its syllabus of modern 
errors, bearing the date of December 8th, 1861. Here 
he will find himself suddenly transferred to the darkest 
period of the middle ages. He will find that all our 
modern civilization is one stupendous heresy. He will 
find that Rome does not pretend to tolerate free thought, 
or free any thing. Does any one imagine that he is 
free to embrace and profess any religion which, by the 
light of reason, he believes to be true, or that there is 
any hope whatever of salvation for those who are not 
found within the Roman Church ? Does he believe that 
in our day it is no longer expedient for the State to re- 
organize Roman Catholicism as the one true religion, to 
the exclusion of all other forms of worship ? that the 
Church has no right to employ force? that in a conflict 
between Church and State, the law of the State is to 
decide? or that Church and State ought in any way to 
be separated? Does he think that the direction of the 
public schools in a Christian land must be subject to 
the State, and that the Roman Catholic Church has no 
right to interfere with the studies, discipline, or choice 



38 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

of teachers ? Does he imagine that he has a right to 
circulate the Bible, or that Protestantism is only a dif- 
ferent form of the one true Christian religion, and that 
a Protestant is as well-pleasing to God as a Catholic? 
Does he think that the method and principles, according 
to which the old scholastic doctors elaborated the theol- 
ogy of the Church, are wholly inadequate to the needs of 
our time or to the progress of science? Does he think 
that philosophy, or ethics, or civil laws, can and may de- 
viate from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church? 
or, last, but not least, does he believe that the Pope of 
Rome can and must reconcile himself to progress and 
liberalism — in a word, conform to modern civilization? 
Then he is a child of the devil, blind and wicked to the 
last degree ! for these are all damnable heresies, branded 
as such by the vicegerent of Christ, in the year of grace 
1864.* 

Yes, my friends, TJwught is the one thing which the 
Catholic Church hates with a deadly hatred, as every 
institution must which imagines itself to be in the ex- 
clusive possession of the truth. And for this reason 
she is the most dangerous element in modern society. 
"Wherever there is ignorance, mental and moral degra- 
dation, rottenness in the family or in the State, there 
she is a power, before which all the intelligence of the 
world may pause and tremble. She is impudent, un- 
scrupulous, treacherous, malignant to the last degree. 
Oh, beware of her ! beware ! 

And thou, dark spirit, with thy whole brood of night 
and hell, beware! beware! Think not to extinguish 

*AI1 the above-mentioned heresies are translated literally from 
the authorized edition of Encyclics, of December 8th, 1864. 



SERMON OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 39 

the light from heaven, or to cover up the rising sun 
with scarlet robes or sable cassocks. 

After the Albigenses come the Hussites, and requite 
with bloody vengeance what their brethren suffered ; 
after Huss and Ziska follow Luther, Hutten, the war 
of thirty years, the Huguenots, the stormers of the Bas- 
tile, and after these the endless army of warriors for 
the light and truth of God. 



40 THE VICKEKS AND PUECELL CONTROVERSY. 



AKCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY TO 
REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, October 16, 1867.) 

"Desiring to be teachers of the law, not understand- 
ing either what they say, or whereof they affirm." (1 
Tim. i : 7.) The sermon preached last Sunday by Rev. 
Thomas Vickers, purporting to be a reply to the re- 
marks of Archbishop Purcell, at the laying of the cor- 
ner-stone of the Church of St. Rose, has been published 
in two, at least, of our city papers. It is a remarkable 
illustration of the truth of the words of St. Paul at the 
head of this article. That there were then, and are now, 
men " desiring to be teachers of the law, not understand- 
ing what they say or of what they affirm." One of these 
is Rev. Thomas Vickers. 

Before passing to the proof, we must ask attention to 
the fact that Archbishop Purcell was not in this in- 
stance any more than in sundry others, the aggressor. 
It is Mr. Vickers who calls the Church a rotten eccle- 
siastical institution ; it is he who qualifies her mission- 
aries as "prize-fighters/' and who consigns herself to 
"rats and mice." If this be not "intellectual rowdy- 
ism," to use his elegant phraseology, we know not what 
deserves the name. And as if this were not sufficient to 
show the reverend gentleman's address in the use of 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 41 

a theological "shillalah, his want of education and 
breeding," he passes over, in the very exordium of his 
discourse, from the ecclesiastical to the political arena, 
and launches the anathema of "despotism" against the 
freemen of the good State of Ohio, who succeeded in the 
last election. Is this, in the judgment of the Rev. Mr. 
Vickers, their reward for vindicating the right to think 
for themselves ? Ah ! ye one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand despots, beware. This new inquisitor, this modern 
Torquemada, will put the screws to you. It is thus he 
illustrates his idea of freethinking ; it is thus that he 
hopes to escape the charge of palpable contradiction ; it 
is thus that he seeks to distract the attention of his 
hearers from the point at issue between him and me. 
After this handsome dodge, the gentleman tells us that 
the old heroes of Greece and Rome, who passed a night — 
it was a long one of eight hundred years — in the mon- 
asteries, were no heroes at all, but only books — to which, 
he thus avows, the ignorant monks gave the "sanctu- 
ary" of an altar, and which, God bless them, they tran- 
scribed hundreds of times, and handed to us in the dawn 
of a better day, across the isthmus of the dark ages. 
Mr. Vickers, who, we believe, thinks he is free to deny, 
and does deny the Divinity, the divine and human na- 
ture of Jesus Christ, next passes to irreverence and 
blasphemy, using language which no Christian, and no 
gentleman should use : " The new dogma," says he, " of 
the Immaculate Conception makes Jesus the cause of 
his own grandmother's having brought his mother into 
the world without due process of nature." This lan- 
guage plainly shows that Rev. Mr. Vickers "does not 
understand that whereof he affirms." The doctrine of the 



42 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Immaculate Conception does not suppose, or teach, that 
Mary, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was brought 
into the world without due process of nature. On the 
contrary, it teaches that she was brought into the world 
as all other children are, with the exception that, as the 
Prophet Jeremiah and Saint John the Baptist, as the 
Holy Bible teaches, were sanctified in their mother's 
womb, so Mary was sanctified in the first moment of 
her conception, itself the result of the sacred process of 
nature. Now, dear Mr. Vickers, you do not believe in 
original sin; you therefore believe that you were born 
immaculate ! Do you, therefore, believe that you were 
brought into the world without due process of nature? 
You have taken the liberty of asking me questions. 
Let me, for once, catechise you and direct the attention 
of all the churches of Cincinnati to your answer. Do 
you believe that "Jesus" was brought into the world 
without what you call "due process of nature ?" If 
you do not believe that he was, I would not waste time 
by noticing you a moment longer. I have no heart to 
reason with those who deny the Redeemer. They may 
associate with Voltaire, and Strauss, and Renan, with 
whom I leave them free to think they shall have con- 
genial fellowship. The gentleman proves by what he 
says of the so-called "Dark Ages," he is in the dark 
concerning them. I did not think it necessary to enu- 
merate the bright lights that illuminated the firmament 
of religion and letters during the long period from the 
sixth to the fourteenth century. I thought better of the 
gentleman's scholarship, than to presume he had never 
heard of Hallam and Maitland, and I need not tell in- 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 43 

telligent readers who they were, or what they have writ- 
ten of the mediaeval era. 

The Venerable Bede was born in 675. Alcuin, 
founder of the Palatine school, and through it, of the 
University of Paris, the teacher and counselor of Char- 
lemagne, was born in the eighth century. Alfred the 
Great in 874; St. Bernard in 925; St. Bonaventura in 
1221 ; Peter of Blois in the twelfth century ; all of 
these, to whom may be added many other illustrious 
names, flourished in the " Dark Ages." And the Greek 
and Latin they understood and wrote would shame but 
too many of the alumni of our modern universities. 
But if Mr. Vickers sincerely desires to estimate aright 
the light or darkness of the human mind from the sixth 
to the fourteenth century, let him stand, as we have 
lately done, under the lofty arches of the grand old 
Cathedrals of Strasburg, of Paris, of Amiens, of Beau- 
vais, of Chartres, of Milan, all built at that period, and 
ask himself who built them? Who composed those 
magnificent epics, those poems in stone ; or, if his head 
become not giddy at such an elevation, let him ascend 
one of the lofty spires of those fine old minsters, and 
he will see farther into his own ignorance than a " pigmy 
could have seen on the shoulders of a giant." He will 
also conclude that the sciences are sisters, and that arch- 
itecture could not have created such wonders if those 
sisters had not stood beside her. After this eclaircisse- 
ment the gentleman will understand why we did not 
" mention any thinker from the middle of the fifth to the 
beginning of the thirteenth century." We could name 
many more than he has probably ever heard of. 

The gentleman next quarrels Avith Tertullian, because, 



44 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

forsooth, lie thought there was no further need to seek 
for saving faith after Christ and the Gospel. Now this 
is precisely what we think. We believe Christ and the 
Gospel, and we claim not, for ourselves or others, the 
right to think or to believe any thing contrary to what 
they teach. Does Mr. Vickers? If he does, let him 
read the graphic description St. Paul gives (2 Timothy 
iii: 1) of those "who are always learning and never 
coming to the knowledge of the truth." Christ gave 
his word, his religion, his holy law for our guide. We 
can not put it under a bushel and go about groping for 
something better. For this we have neither right, nor 
freedom. Tertullian and all the Fathers thought so, so 
thinks the Catholic Church. But "Tertullian never 
recognized the supremacy of the Roman See." 

Let him read the book of his Prescriptions, and he will 
change his mind. In that book Tertullian challenges 
certain heretics to trace their origin from any of the 
apostles, and he then gives a list of the Roman Pon- 
tiffs — links in the golden chain of truth from Peter and 
from Christ — saying, " let heretics pretend to any thing 
like this — confingant tale quid Hairetiei" If Tertullian 
fell from the truth in his later years, it was because he 
turned freethinker. The Church let him go his ways, 
but they were evil. St. Cyprian never differed in faith 
from the Roman Pontiff. See his admirable work de 
TJnitate Ecclesice, on the unity of the Church. See his 
letters to Pope St. Stephen in prison for the faith. See 
the acts of his glorious martyrdom for the same faith. 
See what St. Augustine says of the "falx martyrii" which 
pruned off his fault of resisting the Pope in the alleged 
necessity of rebaptizing such as had been baptized by 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 45 

heretics, in which the Christian world has since decided 
that Cyprian was wrong and the Pope right. And see, 
above all, a Protestant testimony, the four splendid arti- 
cles by Dr. Nevin, in the fourth volume of the Mercers- 
burg Review, for 1852. Do please, reverend sir, read 
those pages, they will do you good. 

St. Augustine. We referred to him as we had to 
Tertullian, Cyprian and others, not for their faith, or 
their opinions, their liberality or illiberality, as Mr. 
Vickers well knows, though he dexterously affects to 
ignore it, but as men of extraordinary genius and 
learning in a Church which he falsely pretends did not 
allow men to think. But Augustine knew the law of 
the empire for the suppression of heresy ; and the ex- 
cesses of Arians, Donatists, Circumcellions, which pro- 
voked them and made them necessary for the safety of 
property and life, for the very salvation of society ; 
and while yet appealing to those laws, he remembered 
how he had once been a heretic himself, and he ex- 
pressed the following beautiful sentiments, which por- 
tray his true spirit: "Let those," says he, Ep. contra 
Fund, " treat you harshly who know not how hard it 
is to get rid of old prejudices. Let those treat you 
harshly who have not learned how very hard it is to 
purify the interior eye and render it capable of con- 
templating the sun of the divine truth. But as for us, 
we are far from this disposition toward persons who 
are separated from us, not by errors of their own in- 
vention, but by being entangled in those of others. We 
are so far from this disposition that we pray God, that in 
refuting the false opinions of those whom you follow, 
not from malice, but imprudence, he would bestow 



46 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

upon us that spirit of peace which feels no other emo- 
tion than charity, no other interest than that of Jesus 
Christ, no other wish but for your salvation." 

St. Thomas Aquinas, like St. Augustine, in the fifth 
century, was aware of the excesses committed in the 
south of France by the Albigenses, the " poor men of 
Lyons/' the Cathari, the Bulgares, whom Mosheim and 
the Centuriators of Magdeburg and McLane so justly 
denounced, and of the laws passed to restrain their vio- 
lence. But in referring to the words put in his mouth, 
or under his pen, by Rev. Mr. Vickers, in loc. cit., I 
find them not. The chapter, as cited, is under my eyes 
as I write ; I shall show it to any one who chooses to 
see it. Aquinas does not say, " The best way to reject 
a heretic is to execute him." He does not say that 
apostates ought to be burned without further ceremony. 
Let not Mr. Vickers trust to the easy erudition of sec- 
ond-hand citation. If he have not the "ipsissima 
verba " of Aquinas before him, let him come to me or 
send his friends. I assure them there shall not be the 
slightest exhibition of the " odium-theologicum " in 
the interview, and I shall place in their hands the 
" Summa." 

Catholics have suffered from persecution for con- 
science' sake as much as non-Catholics. In Ireland 
the persecution has continued for upward of three hun- 
dred years to the present day. But enough has been 
said on this subject of persecution, and all the gross 
exaggerations of anti-Catholic writers, in various writ- 
ten and oral debates, and in our pastoral letters and 
lectures which are in the hands of all who care to read 
and be enlightened. The State, and not the Church, is 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 47 

to blame, as the celebrated Count d'Maistre has shown 
in his letters on the Spanish inquisition. The Popes 
remonstrated in certain instances against the enforce- 
ment of those severe penal laws by the State. As 
Thomas Aquinas says, Questio XI, Art. Ill, Secunda 
SecundaB : " Ex parte autem Ecclesise est Misericordia 
ad errantium conversionem." The part of the Church 
is mercy unto the conversion of the erring. And in this 
there is no hypocrisy, any more than a jury is a 
hypocrite when it hands in a verdict of murder in the 
first degree, but appends to it a recommendation for 
mercy. 

The Jesuits. Who have done more for science and true 
philosophy than they have done? "Who have carried 
astronomical science further and higher than they have 
in these our own days ? Not to speak of their profess- 
ors of mathematics in Europe and China, who but a 
Jesuit has deserved and obtained the gold medal for 
astronomy in the present Paris Universal Exposition? 
Shame on the men who know T not these things, or, know- 
ing, dare deny them. The Jesuits take no uncondi- 
tional vows. They make no vow to obey in any thing 
contrary to the known laws of God. Hence, w T hen they 
do not want to obey in what the law of God approves, 
the doors and windows are open, and they may leave, 
as Passaglia did in Rome, and as others have done in 
Europe and America. 

Now, to show my good will and good temper, I shall 
answer my fortune-teller's questions — Vicker, in Ger- 
man, means fortune-teller — although I have answered 
them already in my pastoral on the Encyclical and the 
Syllabus of 1862 — and, if I mistake not, with the ap- 



48 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

proval of the Cincinnati Gazette which, I hope, as well 
as the Commercial, will publish what I write. 

1. There is no power, human or divine, that forces a 
man to believe a religion, or any thing else, against his 
own honest, enlightened convictions. I would commit 
a heinous crime if I received Mr. Vickers into the 
Catholic Church, except he was first thoroughly con- 
vinced that it was true. And I would be guilty of an 
equally heinous crime if I let him continue in it and 
administered to him its sacraments, if he was convinced 
that it is not true. 

2. I do not believe that the Church has any right to 
employ force to coerce conscience. And it is a Pope 
who teaches me "non est religionis religionem cogere. 
Inauditmn est impingere fidem cum baculo" It is no 
part of religion, says Pope Gregory, quoted by Father 
Arthur O'Leary, to a Spanish bishop, to force religion 
(on any one) or to drive faith into a man with a shil- 
lalah. 

3. I do not want a union of Church and State — I 
deprecate such a union. 

4. I prefer the condition of the Church in these 
United States to its condition in Italy, France, Spain, 
Austria, Bavaria. 

5. I do imagine, and I know that I have a right to 
circulate the Bible ; and one of my first acts on reach- 
ing Cincinnati, perhaps before Mr. Vickers was born — 
I do not know his age — was to publish a " Votum pro 
pace," to put at rest forever, if I could, the stale slan- 
der that the Catholic Church was opposed to the circu- 
lation of the Holy Scriptures. I offered to subscribe 
fifty dollars and join the Bible Society, and place a 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY. 49 

copy of the true Bible — Douay version — in every Cath- 
olic house, but the Bible Society declined accepting the 
liberal proposition.* 

6. I believe that the Pope has no need to reconcile 
himself to progress, or true Christian evangelical lib- 
eralism, for he was never, and is not now, opposed to 
either. 

7. I do not believe that philosopy, ethics, or civil 
law can deviate, without error, from the teaching of 
the Catholic Church. They may deviate from her au- 
thority, as they may deviate from and defy the authori- 
ty of God, but in doing so they are not right. The 
philosophy that does this is unsound, the ethics im- 
moral, the laws unwise and unjust. 

I do not now, for the first time, give these answers to 
the foregoing questions ; and in answering them as I 
have done, I am not " a child of the devil, or blind and 
wicked to the last degree/' as Mr. Vickers, to use his 
own vile language, is " impudent, unscrupulous, treach- 
erous, malignant " enough to say I am. Deluded man ! 
false teacher ! I pity him, forgive him, and pray for his 
conversion ! 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 

* Before the German Bible of Luther, and the French edition 
of Olivet, a Huguenot, both published in 1585, the Catholics had 
already translated the Bible into almost all the European lan- 
guages. They had sent forth twenty-one editions of the Bible in 
Italian; sixteen in German; thirteen in French; ten in Flemish; 
five in Saxon ; two in Bohemian ; and four in Swiss, beside a count- 
less number of editions in Latin, then almost the common lan- 
guage. See Catliolic Telegraph, July 14, 1832. 

4 



60 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



KEPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS TO 
ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Gazette, October 26, 1867.) 
To the Editor of the Cincinnati Gazette : 

Having just returned to the city after an absence of 
a week, I find that Archbishop Purcell has again at- 
tacked me, and in a manner even more characteristic 
of the Romish Church than in the first instance. I 
am not at all surprised that he now wishes to make it 
appear that he was not the aggressor. But I have no 
apprehension that any fair-minded man who read the 
wholly impersonal remarks which I made at the laying 
of the corner-stone of St. John's Church, and also the 
coarse, personal attack which the Archbishop made upon 
me in consequence thereof, will be deceived for a mo- 
ment as to the real state of the case. Nor do I think 
that any man of common sense will be likely to be mis- 
led by that fine stroke of archiepiscopal dialectics in 
which he tries to make it appear that I am opposed to 
" the freemen of the good State of Ohio " thinking for 
themselves and acting on their thought. Is it any in- 
fraction of their " right to think for themselves " that 
I think differently, and say so ? The manner in which 
the Romish Church, through such minions as Torquema- 
da, " put the screws " to those who differed from her, 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 51 

was somewhat different, I take it. Was it not, most 
reverend sir, to use your own elegant language, a 
" handsome dodge " to confound the two ? 

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 

What I said of the dogma of the Immaculate Con- 
ception was simply intended to show that, in regard to 
the Greek and Roman philosophers, etc., the Arch- 
bishop either did not understand what I meant, or had 
committed the hysteron proteron — the logical and chron- 
ological blunder of supposing them to have been edu- 
cated by men who lived ages after them — just as the 
new dogma supposes Mary herself to have been con- 
ceived without sin on account of the merits of a son 
she was to bear in the future (" intuitu meritorum Christi 
Jesu "). If the Archbishop means to assert that being 
conceived without sin is something not outside of the 
" due process of nature," then I am at a loss to know 
why he makes such a fuss about it. 

THE NATURE OF JESUS. 

The Archbishop wishes to catechise me, and directs 
" the attention of all the churches of Cincinnati " to 
my answer. Well, I have no objection. If I under- 
stand his question, he means to ask me whether I believe 
that Jesus " was brought into the world as all other chil- 
dren aref I answer: Yes. Jesus was a man, and as 
such he is the dearest possession of humanity. The 
" Christ " is a theological fiction — mankind needs no 
such Redeemer as the Church has fabricated. This is 
my honest and sacred conviction, and I respectfully 
submit to the Archbishop, and to the public, that when, 



52 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

on this ground, he declines all further intercourse with 
me, he is only furnishing voluntary proof of my orig- 
inal thesis, viz.: That the Church never tolerates any 
body who differs from her; that free thought (which 
means nothing without the liberty to express it) is an 
abomination to her. 

THE POINT AT ISSUE. 

And it is this thesis of which I wish to remind the 
Archbishop. It was the assertion, that the Church had 
never tolerated free thought, which he attempted in his 
first animadversion, to prove untrue; and for this ex- 
press purpose that he quoted the array of names so fatal 
to his argument. He referred to them not merely " as 
men of extraordinary genius and learning," as he now 
pretends, but as illustrations of free thought within the 
pale of the Church. Of course, it was a sad fact for 
the Archbishop that, on examination, not one of them 
answered to his description; that those of them who 
took the liberty of thinking for themselves lost favor 
with the Church ; and those who retained her favor, so 
far from being illustrations, were the bitter opponents of 
free thought. Stick to the point at issue, if you please. 

DARK AGES AND CATHEDRALS. 

I am happy to inform the Archbishop that I am not 
dependent for my knowledge of mediaeval history and 
literature on either Hallam or Maitland, although I am 
not ignorant of what they have written. But to what 
purpose is the new list of names with which he favors 
us? Was free thought better " illustrated " and more 
fully "exercised" by Bede, Alcuin, Alfred the Great, 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 53 

St. Bernard, Bonaventura, and Peter of Blois, than by 
the eight persons he first mentioned ? This is the point. 
Let him have done with the " easy erudition " of look- 
ing into Hallam or Maitland and culling out a few 
high-sounding names in order to impose upon the un- 
learned. Furthermore, there is certainly no objection 
to the Archbishop making it known to the community 
that he has recently stood under the arches of certain 
ancient cathedrals, but the public will doubtless be at a 
loss to know what that fact, or what the cathedrals any 
way have to do with the subject under discussion. Do 
the six cathedrals he mentions, any more than the six 
new names he has brought forward, prove that the 
Church tolerates free thought? What has the sister- 
hood of the sciences to do with the building of cathe- 
drals? Keep to the point, if you please. 

TERTULLIAN. 

The Archbishop admits, substantially, what I asserted 
in regard to Tertullian, except on one point. I asserted 
that " he never recognized the supremacy of the Roman 
Bishop." The Archbishop tells me to read u the book 
of his Prescriptions," and I shall change my mind. 
Now, I am not in this instance going to doubt either 
the honesty or scholarship of the Archbishop, (I shall 
come to a more glaring case by and by,) but simply to 
state facts. Not only does Tertullian in his book De 
pudicitia use the most contemptuous language concern- 
ing the Roman bishop, but there is not in the whole 
book, De prcescriptionibus liczreiicorum (to which the 
Archbishop refers) a single word which, taken in the 
connection in which it occurs, even looks like acknowl- 



54 THE VICKEES AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

edging the Roman supremacy; while, on the other 
hand, there are plenty of passages which show conclu- 
sively that he never dreamed of acknowledging it. So 
much for Tertullian. 

CYPRIAN. 

The Archbishop says Cyprian " never differed in faith 
from the Roman Pontiff." Now, if he means by the 
word "Pontiff" any thing more than "bishop," it is 
perfectly clear that nobody could differ from him in 
any thing, for, in Cyprian's time, there was no such thing 
as a Roman Pontiff — that w T as a later growth. But I 
never said that Cyprian differed " in faith " from the 
Roman bishop. I simply said that Stephen excommu- 
nicated him for venturing to have and express an opin- 
ion different from his own. 

And I now say that the result of the controversy on 
the validity of baptism by heretics proved not only 
that Cyprian did not recognize the supremacy of Rome, 
but that the whole African Church and all the Asiatic 
bishops resisted the arrogance of Stephen. There is still 
extant a letter to Cyprian, written in the name of the 
Asiatic bishops, by Firmilian, Bishop of Csesarea, in 
which he can scarcely find language forcible enough to 
express his contempt for the Roman authority. The 
man whom the Archbishop calls " Pope St. Stephen," 
Firmilian (his brother bishop) compares to Judas ; 
speaks of his audacity and insolence ; says he is justly 
indignant at his open and manifest stupidity (juste in- 
dignor ad hane tarn apertam et manifestam Stephani stul- 
titiam), and calls him the slanderer of the blessed apos- 
tles Peter and Paul (inf avians Petrum et Paulum beatos 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 55 

Apostolos). It will be seen from the following passage 
in what light the assumed power of the Roman bishop 
to excommunicate other bishops was regarded in those 
days: M What grievous sin hast thou committed in sep- 
arating thyself from so many flocks ! Thou hast cut 
off thyself; be not deceived, for he is truly a schismatic 
who has made himself an apostate from the communion 
of ecclesiastical unity. For, while imagining that thou 
hast excommunicated all others, thou hast in reality 
excommunicated thyself alone." This I translate lit- 
erally from the original, and beg the reader to remem- 
ber that the words are addressed to " Pope St. Stephen !" 
Perhaps the Archbishop may not consider Firmilian as 
good authority as Rev. Dr. Nevin. 

AUGUSTINE. 

I asserted that Augustine was the first of the Fathers 
to elaborate a theory for compulsion and persecution 
in matters of religion, and that he is to-day the great 
authority to which the Romish Church looks for her 
right to punish heretics. My opponent does not, and 
can not with truth, deny this, but he seeks to evade it 
by putting the character of Augustine in a false light. 
Now, either Archbishop Pur cell knows that the "Liber 
contra epistolam Manichcm, quam dicunt fundamenti," 
(which is the meaning of his bungling citation: " Ep. 
contra fund,") — he either knows that this book, from 
which he makes his garbled extract, was written long 
before the Donatist controversy, during which (as I 
stated) Augustine elaborated his brutal theory of com- 
pulsion and persecution from the text, Luke xiv : 23, 
and, therefore, proves nothing but that his originally 



56 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

mild disposition toward heretics became bitter and vin- 
dictive in his later years, or he is not aware of this 
simple fact of history. In the one case he has knowl- 
edge of a fact which he tries to conceal from his read- 
ers ; in the other, his ignorance proves that he has no 
claim to be heard in the matter. Which horn of the 
dilemma -will the Archbishop take? Will he sacrifice 
his scholarship or his honesty? And now for 

THOMAS AQUINAS. 

Here I must confess that when I read the Archbish- 
op's paragraph, I could scarcely believe my senses. I 
had asserted that Aquinas was one of the defenders of 
the right of the Church to use violence against here- 
tics ; that he advocated putting them to death " after 
the first and second admonition, " and taught that apos- 
tates were to be executed without further ceremony. I 
did not pretend to give the exact words; I gave the 
sense, and quoted the paragraphs of the " Summa," in 
which this doctrine is contained, so that whoever de- 
sired, and had the opportunity, could refer to them and 
verify my statement. Now the Archbishop comes and 
seeks to give the public the impression that I relied on 
the "easy erudition of a second-hand citation/' did not 
know what I was talking about, and that Aquinas had 
never said' any such thing. He says he has "the chap- 
ter as cited under his eyes as he writes," and there is 
no such thing there. What am I to conclude? That, 
although having the book before him, he does not un- 
derstand the language in which it is written? or, that 
he has the book, can read it, but wishes to deceive hia 
readers as to its contents? He knew very well that no 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 57 

one of them would come to him to see it. Why did he 
not print the paragraphs in question, with a correct 
translation, so that his readers could judge for them- 
selves? He was writing for a paper which bears his 
name as chief editor, over which he has complete con- 
trol — a paper expressly devoted to the interest of the 
Romish Church — and was not, therefore, cramped for 
room. Why did he not do it ? He dared not. He 
knew that, if he did, his case was irrecoverably lost. 
Ah, yes! dear Archbishop, I also have the "ipsissima 
verba" before me as I write, and I hope that you will 
not regard it as an "exhibition of the odium theologi- 
cum" if I print them with a translation. The follow- 
ing passages are found in the Summa, Migne's (Catho- 
lic) edition, as correctly cited in my sermon. {Summon 
Seeunda Secwidce, Qucest. XI, Art. Ill, IV.) 

Art. Ill is headed: Utrum hceretici sint tolerandi? 
(Whether heretics are to be tolerated?) The method 
of Aquinas is first to state and meet objections, and 
then to develop his own opinion. Here he first cites 
various passages from the New Testament (2 Tim. ii: 
24-26; 1 Cor. xi: 19; Matt, xiii: the parable of the 
tares), in favor of the opinion that heretics ought to be 
tolerated ; to all these he opposes the passage (Tit. iii : 
10, 11): "A man that is an heretic, reject/' etc., and 
then uses the following words : 



-^ 



ORIGIN Ali. 
Bespondeo dicendum quod circa 

hcereticos duo sunt consider and a : 
unum quid em ex parte ipsorum ; 
aliud vero ex parte Ecdesice. Ex 
parte quidem ipsorum est pecca- 
tum, per quod meruerunt non so- 



TRANSLATION. 

I reply that, in regard to 
heretics, there are two things 
to be considered: one, indeed, 
concerns themselves; the other 
surely concerns the Church. 
For their part they have com- 



58 



THE VICKERS AND PTJRCELL CONTROVERSY. 



lum ab Ecclesia per excommuni- 
cationem separari, sed etiam per 

MORTEM A MUNDO EXCLUDE 

Multo enlm gravius est corrum- 
pere fidem, per quam est animaz 
vita, quam falsare pecuniam, per 
quam temporali vitce subvenitur. 
Unde si falsarii pecuniae vel alii 
malefactores statim per scecidares 
principes juste morti traduntur, 
multo magis h^eretici statim 

EX QUO DE HLERESI CONVIN- 
CUNTUR, POSSUNT NON SOLUM 
EXCOMMUNICARI, SED ET JUSTE 
OCCTDI. 



Ex parte autem Ecclesioz est 
misericordia ad errantium conver- 
sionem; et ideo non statim con- 
demnat, sed post primam et se- 
cundum correptionem, ut Apos- 
tolus docet; postmodum vero si 
adhuc pertinax inveniatur, Ec- 
clesia de ejus conversione non spe- 
rans, aliorum saluti providet, eum 
ab Ecclesia separando per excom- 
municationis sententlam ; et UL- 
tertus relinquit eumjudicio sce- 

Culari A MUNDO EXTERMINAN- 
DUM. 



mitted a sin, on account of 
which they not only deserve 
to be severed from the Church, 
by excommunication, but to be 
removed from the world by death; 
for it is a more grievous offense 
to corrupt the faith, which is the 
life of the soul, than to counter- 
feit money, which only helps 
sustain the life of the body. 
Hence, it* counterfeiters of mon- 
ey, or other malefactors, are 
by the secular authorities, much 
justly put straightway to death 
more may heretics, the instant they 
are convicted of heresy, not only be 
excommunicated, but justly killed, 

(Now follow the words, "The 
part of the Church is mercy to 
the erring," which Archbishop 
Purcell dishonestly tears out 
of their connection, in order to 
bind ids readers.) 

But the part of the Church 
is mercy to the erring; and, 
therefore, she does not imme- 
diately condemn, but "after the 
first and second admonition, " 
as the Apostle teaches; but af- 
terward, if he still be found un- 
yielding, the Church, having no 
hope of his conversion, cares for 
the salvation of others by sever- 
ing him from the Church by the 
sentence of excommunication ; 
and finally delivers him over to 
the secular tribunal to be exter- 
minated from the world by death/ 



The following is the heading of Art. IV: Utrum re- 
vertentes ab hceresi sint ab Ecclesia recipiendi t (Whether 
those who renounce their heresy are to be received by 
the Church?) Aquinas follows the same method here, 
first stating the reasons of the opposite side, and then 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 



59 



refuting them. His own conclusion is contained in the 
following extract : 



ORIGINAL. 
Et ideo Ecclesm primo quidem, 
revertentes ab hccresi, non so- 
lum recipit ad pamitentiam, sed 
etiam conservat eos in vita, et in- 
terdum redituit eos dispensative 
ad ecclesiasticas dignitates quas 
primus habebant y si videantur 
vere conversi ; et hoc pro bono 
pads frequenter legitur esse fac- 
tum. Sed quando recepti iterum 
relabuntur ; videtur esse signum 
inconstantioc eorum circa fidem ; 
et ideo ulterius redeuntes recipi- 
untur quidem ad pcenitentiam y 

NON TAMEN UN LIBERENTUR 
A SENTENTIA MORTIS. 



TRANSLATION. 

And, therefore, the Church, in 
the first instance, not only ad- 
mits to penitence those who re- 
nounce their heresy, but she also 
preserves their lives, and occa- 
sionally restores them, by dis- 
pensation, to their former eccle- 
siastical honors, when they ap- 
pear to be truly converted ; and 
this, for the sake of peace, is 
frequently taken for granted ; 
but when those who have been 
restored again relapse, it seems 
to be a sign of their incon- 
stancy in faith, and, therefore, 
such as afterward return are 
indeed admitted to penitence, 
but not liberated from the sentence 
of death. 



"God," continues Aquinas, "who is the searcher of 
hearts, know T s whether those who return are sincere, 
always receives them ; but the Church can not imitate 
Him, for it is to be presumed that those were not really 
converted, who, having been received, fell again; and, 
therefore, while she does not deny them the means of 
salvation, she refuses to save them from impending 
death" (periculo mortis eos non tuetur). 

Now, in this book, Thomas Aquinas is not writing a 
polemic, treatise against "the Albigenses, the 'poor men 
of Lyons,' the Cathari, the Bulgares," or any other spe- 
cial class of heretics, but he is writing a body of Chris- 
tian doctrine, universally true, and universally applica- 
ble, and which the Romish Church to-day adopts as a 
standard. I dare not trust myself to characterize, in 



60 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

fitting language, this attempt of Archbishop Purcell to 
defend a bad cause by such reprehensible means. The 
public is now in possession of the evidence, and will 
give its own verdict. 

THE JESUITS. 

After the above exposition, our confidence in what 
the Archbishop says will not be very great. When he 
affirms that "the Jesuits take no unconditional vows;" 
that "they make no vow to obey in any thing contrary 
to the known laws of God ; " I beg leave to refer him 
to the text of the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, 
where he will find the following words : The candidate 
"must regard the Superior as Christ the Lord, and 
must strive to acquire perfect resignation and denial 
of his own will and judgment, in all things conforming 
his will and judgment to that which the Superior wills 
and judges'' (Const., par. iii, cap. i, sec. 23). And also 
the following: "As for holy obedience, this virtue must 
be perfect in every point — in execution, in will, in in- 
tellect — doing what is enjoined with all celerity, spirit- 
ual joy, and perseverance; persuading ourself that every 
thing is just; suppressing every repugnant thought and 

judgment of one's own in a certain obedience; 

and let every one persuade himself that he who lives 
under obedience should be moved and directed, under 
Divine Providence, by his Superior, just as if he were a 
corpse (per hide ac si cadaver esset), which allows itself 
to be moved and led in any direction" (Const., par. vi, 
cap. i, sec. 1). 

the pope's syllabus vs. the archbishop's. 
In conclusion, I can not but congratulate the Arch- 



TtEPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 



61 



bishop on his syllabus of answers to my questions. In 
some respects he is decidedly in advance of his master, 
the Pope ; nay, he is a rank heretic, and, as such, is in 
great danger of being excommunicated, and perhaps 
burned. Let us see what the Pope says, on the one 
hand, and the Archbishop, on the other. I translate 
from the authorized edition of the Litterce Encyclyccz : 



THE POPE. 

1. It is a damnable error to 
maintain that "every man is 
free to embrace and profess that 
religion which his reason leads 
him to believe to be true." ($ III, 
XV.) 

2. It is a damnable error 
to maintain that "the Church 
ought to be separated from the 
State, and the State from the 
Church." (?VII, LV.) 

^ 3. The Pope calls Bible So- 
cieties "pestilences," and says 
he has often condemned them 
in the severest language. ($ IV.) 



THE ARCHBISHOP. 

1. "There is no power, hu- 
man or divine, that forces a 
man to believe a religion, or 
any thing else, against his 
own honest, enlightened con- 
victions." 

2. "I do not want a union 
of Church and State; I depre- 
cate such a Union." 



3. The Archbishop says he 
proposed to join the Bible So- 
ciety, and help to circulate the 
Bible. 



I think the question will occur to every one, which 
represents the Romish Church : the Pope, or the Arch- 
bishop of Cincinnati ? 

In conclusion, let me correct another misstatement 
of the Archbishop's. He asserted that I called him 
"impudent, unscrupulous, treacherous, malignant." I 
never did such a thing, as every one knows who read 
my sermon. I will not say what I think about it now. 
Facts speak for themselves. 

THOMAS VICKERS, 

Minister of the First Congregational Society. 



62 THE VICKEES AND PUECELL CONTEOVEESY. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY TO 
REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, October 30, 1867.) 

" Thomas Vickers, minister of the First Congrega- 
tional Society" — he does not say where — occupies more 
than a column of the Cincinnati Gazette, of the 26th Oc- 
tober, in which, in the vain effort to extricate himself 
from the mire of his former flounderings, he sinks more 
irretrievably. 

In one of those efforts he endeavored to entertain the 
worshipers in Hopkins' Hall with the irreverent in- 
formation that "Jesus, by an anticipated application 
of the merits of the atonement, made his grandmother 
bring his mother into the world without due process of 
nature." We argued, that if Mary, in virtue of her im- 
maculate conception, or exemption from original sin, 
which is the same thing, was born without due process 
of nature, then Mr. Vickers, who believes not in original 
sin, and who, therefore, believes that he was conceived 
immaculate, was brought into the world without due 
process of nature. To this inexorable " argumentum ad 
hominem" he has taken care, after a week's reflection, 
not to answer. Perhaps in his next he will tell the 
First Congregational Society how he came into the 
world at all, and how he came to be their minister. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 63 

He also insists in the paper before us, that when he 
branded the freemen of Ohio, "despots," he inflicted on 
them no censure, insinuated no reproach. Then why- 
did he so brand them ? 

When the gentleman says that " Christ is a theologi- 
cal fiction," and not God, we solemnly declare that such 
blasphemous freethinking is an abomination to the 
Church and to us, and should be such to every Chris- 
tian — at the same time that we would not for the world 
abridge Mr. Vickers of his freedom to think and to 
speak as he does to all who pay him for such thinking 
and such speaking ! 

We said that thought is essentially free, that neither 
God nor the Church could enslave it. And this, we still 
contend, is true. Men could think and speak as they 
pleased, but when they thought and spoke what was 
wrong, the Church had the right to tell them so, as Mr. 
Vickers now tells the " despots " of Ohio. Stick to the 
point, sir ! 

The geutleman returns to the "Dark Ages," to prove 
that they were dark, and that the Church made them 
dark — that she put an extinguisher on the human mind 
by not tolerating "freethinking." Is not this the point, 
friend? Now we could occupy all the columns of one 
number of the Gazette or Commercial with extracts from 
non-Catholic writers, leaving out Maitland and Hallam, 
to prove that they were ages of light and not of dark- 
ness in the sense of Mr. Vickers, and that we are in- 
debted to them for the greater measure of light that we 
enjoy. A Catholic churchman he would not believe 
on this subject. Here is testimony to which he may not 
demur. It is that of a radical Unitarian left wing — ■ 



64 THE TICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

namely, Kalph Waldo Emerson, in an oration delivered 
by him at Harvard College. 

"In modern Europe, the middle ages were called the 
1 Dark Ages/ ten centuries, from the fifth to the fifteenth. 
Who dares to call them so now? They are seen to be 
the feet on which we walk, the eyes with which we see. 
They gave us decimal numbers, gunpowder, glass, chem- 
istry, and Gothic architecture, and their paintings ever 
the delight and tuition of our age. Six centuries ago 
Roger Bacon explained the Procession of the Equi- 
noxes, and looking over the horizon from London to 
America, announced that ships could be constructed 
that could be driven more rapidly than a whole galley 
of rowers could drive them, and machines which could 
fly into the air like birds." 

" They also," adds the author, or reporter of this ora- 
tion, "gave us the discovery of America and the inven- 
tion of the art of printing. The darkness of those times 
arises from our own want of information, not from the 
absence of intelligence that distinguished them. Hu- 
man thought was never more active and never produced 
greater results in any period of the world." 

In some sense, as even Carlyle admits, (see "The 
Hero and Poet," page 129, U. P. James, Cincinnati, 
1842): "This glorious Elizabethean era, with its Shaks- 
peare as the outcome and flowerage of all which had 
preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of 
the middle ages. The Christian faith, which was the 
theme of Dante's song, had produced the practical life 
w T hich Shakspeare was to sing. For religion, then, as 
it is now and always is, was the soul of practice — the 
primary vital fact in men's life." Your flowerage, Mr. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 65 

Vickers, and that of all who think like you, your flow- 
erage, who forget what you owe to a Catholic ancestry 
is— poppy. 

Mr. Vickers introduces a new name when he cites 
Firmilian. But in this he flounders in the mire again. 
For if it were true that Firmilian used the coarse lan- 
guage in addressing the martyred Pope, St. Stephen, 
which Mr. Vickers quotes, it would only prove what we 
told him before, that de jure et de facto the Church could 
not, and did not, interdict free thought. But if the gen- 
tleman reads the dissertation in 4to, written by Marcel- 
linus Molkenbuhr, and printed in Munster, Westphalia, 
in 1790, he will find that the letter in question was 
falsely attributed to Firmilian, and that it was, on the 
contrary, the production of an African Donatist of the 
fourth century. 

Tertullian eloquently defended the Catholic faith, and 
showed its purity maintained by Peter, whom Christ 
made the head of his Church on earth, and Peter's suc- 
cessors in the See of Rome ; and when, by undue harsh- 
ness to the erring, he forfeited charity, he became a 
Montanist, and then thought and wrote as freely as he 
pleased, de pudieitia, or any thing else. 

Augustine and Aquinas knew the laws in force in 
their respective ages against heresy, which the civil 
power, like the Scripture classed with the most heinous 
crimes : " idolatry, enmities, quarrels, dissensions, sects, 
envyings, murders, drunkenness — of the which I foretell 
you that they who do such things shall not obtain the 
kingdom of God." (St Paul's Ep. to Gal., vs. 20, 21.) 
The very text of Aquinas, as quoted by Mr. Vickers, 
was quoted by Archbishop Purcell. The author of the 
5 



66 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Summa did say, as Mr. Vickers acknowledges, that the 
part of the Church was mercy, but that when the her- 
etic continued obstinate, she had nothing more to do 
in his case, but leave him to the State — " Ulterius re- 
linquit eum judici seculari a mundo exterminandum" 
With this consummation the Church had no more to 
do than she had to do with Jehovah's laws against 
false religions under the old dispensation. In this she 
had no more to do in suppressing free thought than 
God had when he thundered from Sinai: "Thou shalt 
not covet." In this the Archbishop suppressed noth- 
ing — had nothing to suppress ; had no need of reticence, 
and concealed nothing. But he could scarcely believe 
his senses when Mr. Vickers, with the hope of helping 
his cause by horrifying his readers, spoke of flames and 
burning, not a word of which is to be found in the text 
which he pretends to quote so ingenuously from St. Thomas. 
But if, in a by-gone age, Aquinas, or any one else, a 
thousand times over justified the punishment of death 
for heresy, it is no more than has been done almost in 
our own age, "down East;" and as, thank God! the 
world has outgrown the policy and practice which we 
now so cordially condemn here in the United States, 
where Catholics were the first to proclaim liberty of 
conscience for all, it is with a bad grace, indeed, that 
a Unitarian rakes up the buried embers of the New 
England witches, or the long-extinguished fires of scrip- 
tural or mediaeval persecution for conscience' sake. 

In Archbishop PurceH's Pastoral on the Syllabus, in 
1862, he used language similar to that of his answer 
to Mr. Vickers ; and he has since stood in the near 
presence of His Holiness, and of five hundred of his 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 67 

brother bishops, and has not been rebuked for his re- 
corded sentiments and avowed convictions by him or 
them. We Catholics know our religion, and have not 
to learn it from enemies, who, like the pagan tyrant of 
old, dressed the Christians in the skins of wild beasts, 
and then set the dogs on them. 

It is disingenuous, dishonest in Mr. Vickers to take 
no notice of the answers given to his calumnious impu- 
tations. If it were another man than one appearing 
in the garb of a " minister," we might be tempted to 
use a monosyllable, when he says an indulgence is a 
pardon for past or a license for future sin — that the 
Catholic Church is opposed to the circulation of the 
Bible, or that the Jesuits' vow binds them to any thing 
contrary to the known law of God. In conclusion, as 
the gentleman can hardly open his mouth without mak- 
ing a misstatement, we tell him that Archbishop Pur- 
cell is not the editor of the Catholic Telegraph, what- 
ever control he may exercise over its columns. 

For the information of all who sincerely seek the 
truth on questions started by Rev. Mr. Vickers, who 
seems comfortably ignorant of the past, as if he had 
spent his life in a cave, or had slept an age, like Rip 
Van Winkle, we publish all our Pastoral of 1865: 

Venerable Brethren of the Clergy ; 

Beloved Brethren of the Laity : 

On the memorable and ever glorious Festival of 
Pentecost, 1862, when the Catholicity of the true Church 
was illustrated in a manner never previously witnessed 
in her eventful history; when three hundred bishops, 
many of whom had come from Lands and Sees whose 



68 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

names would be sought in vain in the annals of the 
General Councils, surrounded the Holy Father in that 
" Eternal ark of worship undefiled," which, " of Tem- 
ples old and altars new, standeth alone with nothing 
like to it," the mind of the Vicar of Christ was pre- 
occupied with the thought of the monstrous errors which 
w r ere undermining the very foundations of social and re- 
ligious order, and threatening to banish the fear and the 
love, the name and the idea, of God from the Universe. 
Faithful to the office committed to him by the Prince 
of Pastors, to guard his lambs and sheep from prowling 
wolves, to lead them to wholesome pastures and refresh- 
ing streams, the Supreme Pontiff commanded that a 
syllabus, or list, of the most perverse and dangerous of 
these errors should be communicated to us, and, doubt- 
less, to every one of the assembled Prelates, to be 
thoughtfully, conscientiously, prayerfully considered by 
us, with the aid of such member of our clergy as we 
deemed most capable, for learning, prudence and piety, 
to assist us in their examination, censure and correction. 
When " Peter spoke, the much disputing ceased " in 
the first, the model, Council of Jerusalem. The voice 
of the successor of Peter was heard in the subsequent 
Councils, as the voice of God. When he spoke, the cause 
was ended. His decrees are irreformable, his judgment 
irreversible, his verdict infallible. Nevertheless, with 
the humility of Him who asked His Apostles " who did 
men say, who did they say that He was," the Pope, who 
"lords it not over our faith," condescends to ask and 
patiently awaits the answers of his brethren, from June, 
1862, to December, 1864, before pronouncing a defini- 
tive judgment. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 69 

This judgment has been pronounced, this sentence 
proclaimed to the world in the Encyclical, or Circular, 
of the 8th December, the ninth anniversary of the Dec- 
laration of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. 
We bow to it reverently ; we receive it implicitly ; we 
embrace it cordially ; we hail it gratefully. To us it is 
as the voice of God on Sinai, on the Jordan, on Thabor. 

"Why is it not so received by all?" To whom else 
have been entrusted "the words of eternal life?" For 
whom else has Christ prayed "that his faith may 
never fail?" To whom else has He given the charge 
to confirm "his brethren." By whom else has he ever 
drawn a single nation from Paganism to Christianity? 
Whom else did he make the civilizer of barbarians? 
Whom else, according to even infidel authority, did He 
make, " politically, socially, and morally, the savior of 
Europe ? " By whom else did He have " the effort made, 
commensurate with the danger, that saved Europe from 
Islamism, and prevented the evidences of the Koran 
from being demonstrated to a circumcised audience in 
the halls of Oxford?" 

We are bound to remind men of these cardinal truths 
of history, when they make it convenient to forget 
them. We are bound to set up those landmarks, when 
men, from sinister motives, cast them down. 

We are aware that the Pope showed little worldly 
wisdom when he issued the Encyclical. It was neither 
a homage to Csesarism, nor a bid for popularity. But 
he occupies high and holy ground. His stand was on 
the watch-tower, where Christ had placed him, and 
where he beheld from afar the rolling up of the dark, 
portentous clouds, where he heard the first mutterings 



70 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

of the storm, of which the world at his feet, immersed 
in sensual and ambitious projects, seemed utterly un- 
conscious, and he gave to all the solemn warning, like 
the unheeded Noah of old, to fly from the wrath to 
come, to seek shelter and safety in the ark. 

The docile children of the Church could have desired 
that copies of the Encyclical had been sent to them, to 
be translated, before they had been misinterpreted and 
perverted by anti-Catholic and infidel journalists. Had 
this been done, the hue and cry that greeted its appear- 
ance might have been less violent. But in this, too, we 
recognize the hand of Providence sweetly and strongly 
disposing all things. Suspecting no evil, we left the 
important document in the hands of the manufacturers 
of public opinion for two Continents, the London Times 
and Paris Steele and its compeers ; and never was igno- 
rance more gross, or bad faith more barefaced and un- 
blushing, than are betrayed in their translation of, and 
comments on, the Encyclical. The Editor of the Times 
is now impaled on the horns of the " mad bull " of his 
own creation ; and the illustrious Bishop Dupanloup, 
of Orleans, has exhibited the infidel press of the French 
capital in a condition not less humiliating, or more en- 
viable. We have published this noble Prelate's work 
in the columns of the Catholic Telegraph and Wahr- 
heitsfreund, and in pamphlet form, so that all, who 
will, may read and understand the perfidy of the Con- 
vention of the 15th September, and the true import of 
the Encyclical. The Pope has solemnly approved the 
writing of the Bishop of Orleans; the Cardinal Vicar, 
Patrizi, has approved it; the Cardinal Secretary of 
State, Antonelli, has approved it. The silence, the 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 71 

humiliation, of the enemies of the truth, the Pope and 
the Church have, in their way, approved it. The many- 
headed hydra, the multifarious errors, of the condemned 
propositions, crushed by a mightier club than that of 
the mythological Hercules, have approved it by their 
death screams. 

But let us hear an able vindication of the Pope and 
the Encyclical from another, a non-Catholic, source. It 
is the Berlin Review that now speaks : 

"When an old, helpless captive, a plundered man, 
'whom God has ordained to be the judge and the ex- 
'eeutor of the laws of heaven, becomes the accuser, 
' when to States become godless he recalls the remem- 
brance of those doctrines which alone give duration 
'to nations and power, it is a sign that the wave of 
'worldly success has reached its highest tide, that the 
'reaction has begun which w T ill show how empty and 
'how short-lived are selfish triumphs. The laurel of 
' the conqueror fades, and the unarmed is victor. . . . 
' The Lieutenancy of Pope Pius IX will fill a glorious 
'place in the history of Catholic Christendom. It is 
'undeniable that under this Pope, Catholicism has made 
'greater conquests than for centuries past. The bold 
' decree by which Pius districted England into dioceses, 
'and sent to Westminster an Archbishop who should 
' gather the sons of the faithful, and win back the fallen, 
'was a deed of conquest. The raising of the Immacu- 
late Conception of Mary to an undoubted Dogma of 
'the Church, served as evidence that Catholicism, in 
matters of Christian faith, was still full of vigorous 
action. Finally, the martyrium of Pius IX has put 
'the seal to the plenitude of life in his Church. 



72 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

" Keligious doubt and State tyranny go hand in hand. 
' The human mind, which the arrogance of emancipated 
* science flings from one uncertainty to another, at last 
' surrenders to the thesis that wealth and pleasure are 
'the only goods for man; and thus arises the moral 
' anarchy in which every individual must bend to the 
pressure of the strongest usurper. From this corrup- 
' tion Pius saves his Christian flock by the healing power 
' of authority in faith. 

"Therefore the Emperor trembles. He wanted to 
' storm heaven, and forgot that man is great then only 
' when he confesses that he is less than heaven. ' Coelum 
'debellet Imperator,' says Tertullian, 'coelum capti- 
"vum triumpho suo invehat. Non potest. Ideo mag- 
"nus est quia ccelo minor est.' And Pius IX eluci- 
' dated the warning of Tertullian, when a few days 
' ago he addressed to the French General, ' Justice and 
"judgment are the preparation of thy seat.' He who 
'holds a place to which he has no right, will be judged 
1 and cast off by the Redeemer. . . . No, the warn- 
' ing of the Pope is a progress-favoring counter stroke 
'against immersion in the swamp into which Imperial 
'skepticism would have plunged us. . . . We are 
' to be sent in pursuit of the false and the frivolous : but 
' the Church puts a stop to the fool's chase by teaching 
'us that we find rest in submission to the authority of 
'faith and the redeeming Son of God." 

Let us now look at the condemned propositions, and 
see if we can not assent to the justice, and wisdom, 
and necessity of their condemnation with the same full- 
ness of faith and the same conviction of the under- 
standing with which the first Christians received the 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 73 

Four Gospels, the early Fathers subscribed to the first 
four General Councils, and their children and successors 
in the faith, in these latter ages, the decisions of Trent 
and the Creed of Pope Pius IV. 

We do not believe in the absurdity of Pantheism — 
that every thing in the Universe is an integral part of 
God — and that there is no other, no personal God. 
We do not believe that every thing made itself and made 
every thing else. We believe that there is a personal 
God, who made all that exists ; that the hyena, the de- 
mon, the assassin is not any part of God, and if he 
were, we would not be any part of him. Therefore, 
with the Encyclical, we condemn Pantheism. 

We do not believe that the best form of society and 
the exigencies of civil progress absolutely require hu- 
man society to be constituted and governed without any 
regard whatever to religion. 

We do not believe that while God leaves all men 
free before the final judgment, to believe falsehood and 
do wrong, that he grants any man a right to believe 
error or to commit crime. We do not believe that in 
this sense liberty of conscience and of worship is the 
right of any man, which should be proclaimed by law, 
and that citizens should have the right to all kinds of 
liberty, to be restrained by no law, Ecclesiastical or 
Civil, by which they may be enabled to manifest openly 
and publicly their ideas by word of mouth, through the 
press, or any other means. The maxim that error may 
be left free to write or speak what it pleases, as long 
as truth is left free to combat it, has been illustrated 
by the penalties incurred by those who dared, recently, 
to speak and write against the Union and the Consti- 



74 THE VICKERS AND PUKCELL CONTROVERSY. 

tution, and to recommend assassination and sympathize 
with assassins. 

We do not believe that the will of the people, man- 
ifested by what is called public opinion, or in any other 
way, constitutes the supreme law, independent of all di- 
vine and human right; and that in the political order, 
accomplished facts, by the mere fact of having been ac- 
complished, have the force of right. He that by chi- 
canery, knavery, or force, robs me of houses or lands, 
is as much a thief as he who steals my purse. Length 
of unjust possession confers no right, and the land and 
the money robber are equally bound to restitution of 
principal and interest. 

When we rise from the reading of Spelman's His- 
tory of Sacrilege in England, we do not believe that the 
suppression of the Monasteries, the spoliation of shrines, 
the seizing of the rich domains, into which drained 
swamps, reclaimed wastes, and cleared forests were 
changed by the toil of the Monks, have been left 
wholly unpunished by divine justice even in this world; 
or that they will be more leniently dealt with in the 
next; and, therefore, we can not believe, against the 
dictates of reason, justice, and humanity, that the En- 
cyclical is wrong in denouncing the imitation of such 
sacrilege in Piedmont, Portugal, Spain, or any other 
country. 

We do not believe that " property is robbery ;" that 
a new division of whatever a toiling man has earned dur- 
ing the week should be made with his lazy, drunken, 
gambling neighbor every Saturday night. 

We do not believe that civil law has a right to abol- 
ish the Sabbath, or the religious holiday ; that it has 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl's REPLY. 75 

the right to grant divorces from the bond of marriage — ■ 
that is, to do what Christ has forbidden, "separate 
"those whom God has joined together." 

We do not believe, with socialists and communists, 
that families must be absorbed by the State, that parents 
have not the control of their children's minds and mor- 
als — their education, except as given them by the civil 
law, which, by such usurpation, invades not only the 
dearest rights of parents, but the authority of God 
Himself, delegated to these His representatives on earth. 

AVe do not believe that the Clergy have ever been the 
enemies of the useful sciences, of progress, or of civil- 
ization ; or that they should be deprived of all par- 
ticipation in the work of teaching and training the 
young. 

We do not believe that the laws of the Church do not 
bind the conscience if they are not promulgated by the 
civil power. On the contrary, as Ambrose, the great 
Archbishop of Milan, the immortal Athanasitjs, and 
the President of the First Council of Nice, said to con- 
temporary kings : " The Church belongs to God, there- 
" fore, it should not be delivered up to Caesar. A 
" good Emperor is within the Church, not above it. . . . 
" Meddle not with Ecclesiastical matters, nor dictate to 
" us on such matters, but rather learn these things of 
" us. To you God has committed the Imperial sway, 
" to us he has entrusted what appertains to the Church. 
" You have no pow T er, O, Emperor, over incense and 
" the sacred things." Hence, we do not believe that airy 
earthly ruler has been made head of Christ's Church. 
Neither a Henry VIII, nor any of his successors; 
neither a Bonaparte nor a Victor Emanuel. Nor 



76 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

do we believe that that is a " Holy Synod " which pro- 
fesses that the Holy Ghost is sent to it in a dispatch 
from the autocrat of all the Russias, in the portfolio 
of a colonel of huzzars ! 

We believe that the Church was founded by Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, to guide us in all truth. 
That she is the ark of safety to all who will not per- 
ish ; that she is supreme in spirituals. 

We do not believe that all action of God upon man 
and the w T orld is to be denied; that human reason, 
without regard to God, is the arbiter of truth and 
falsehood, and of good and evil, and sufficient, by its 
natural force, to secure the welfare of men and nations ; 
that Christian faith is in opposition to human reason ; 
that the prophecies and miracles recorded in the sacred 
Scriptures are the fictions of poets ; that one religion is 
as good as another, unless in the sense as some said 
that it is, and a great deal better; that we may enter- 
tain a well-founded hope that those who are in no manner 
in the true Church (not even in desire) may be saved. 

We do not believe that the abolition of the temporal 
powers, of which the Apostolic See is possessed, would 
contribute to the liberty and prosperity of the Church. 
The possession of temporal power of territory, is not 
essential to the exercise of the supreme spiritual pre- 
rogative granted by Christ to His Vicar. But it is 
convenient, it is salutary, it is sanctioned by the expe- 
rience of a thousand years ; and the States of the Church, 
even before the spoliation of the Legations, were so 
small that they should never have attempted the cu- 
pidity of the sacrilegious invader. 

We do not believe that the Roman Pontiff can and 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 77 

ought to reconcile himself to and agree with progress, 
liberalism, and civilization ; for he has never quarreled 
with true progress, true liberty, or Christian civiliza- 
tion, in the front ranks of which he has been ever seen 
since the very origin of Christianity. 

We do not believe that the civil authority possesses 
power to decide, in the matter of administering the 
Divine Sacraments, as to the dispositions necessary for 
their reception. 

We do not believe that the savage is better than the 
Christian and civilized condition of society; that natu- 
ralism is preferable to revelation ; or that reason and 
religion, both given us by the same Divine Author, can 
never be antagonistic, the one to the other. 

We believe that as God forbade false worship among 
the Jews, while, for special reasons, they were isolated 
and kept separate from the other nations of the earth, 
the Gentiles, so the Pope and every Christian should 
wish that there w T ere in the w T orld no errors ; that we all 
may be " one " in faith, as the Savior prayed for us the 
night before he suffered. But as nations and govern- 
ments are now constituted under the good providence 
of God, so does he accept them. Pius VII crowned 
the first Bonaparte, though he knew he had sworn to 
the constitution which gave liberty of conscience and 
freedom of religious worship to France. The present 
glorious Pontiff, like so many of his predecessors, has 
issued his Apostolic letters for the consecration of 
Bishops who swear allegiance to governments which 
look with equal favor, or indifference, on the various 
forms of Christianity, or the oppugners thereof, so long 
as their conduct is conformable to the civil law. 



78 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

We do not believe that the Pope would allow con- 
science to be coerced ; that he would allow an impeni- 
tent, unbelieving man to be constrained to receive Bap- 
tism or the other Sacraments ; or that he believes that 
Goi> would look without indignation on the hypocriti- 
cal or the compulsory homage of the human soul. On 
the contrary, he acknowledges, with an ancient Father 
of the Church, "that it is an unheard-of procedure to 
" infuse faith into a man with a cudgel." He knows that 
there is such a thing as judicial blindness. That there 
are unhealthy and unsound intellects ; in a word, monsters 
in mind as well as in body, disbelievers in deity, in moral- 
ity, in religion, and even in reason ; and that such, as 
long as they outrage not the laws of society, are to be con- 
signed to their folly. They are better out of the Church 
than in it. Hence, while the Pope and every honest man 
regrets that the "old chaos," the anarchy of intelligences, 
" should be made the type of true religion," he reproves 
not the memorable words of the mild Fenelon to king 
James: "Grant civil toleration, not as approving as 
"indifferent, but as permitting with patience whatever 
"God permits, and in endeavoring to bring back men 
" to the truth by moral suasion." 

Finally, we believe the Church was destined by Jesus 
Christ to accomplish its Divine Mission of preparing 
souls for heaven, under every form of government, and 
in every condition of human society. She condemns 
none where the laws are just and impartially adminis- 
tered. Where the laws are unjust, and rulers violate 
the written or the natural compact by which they claim 
to govern, she " interdicts not to her children patriotism." 
She asserts for them the inalienable right to raise both 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 79 

voice and hand to denounce oppression and overthrow the 
oppressor; but she does not encourage secret societies, 
she urges not to precipitate resolves, to revolution. She 
counsels prudence, forbearance, remonstrance, patience. 
She forbids individuals to involve themselves and their 
co-workers in irretrievable ruin by hasty, unwise, and 
impulsive action, which rivets chains instead of breaking 
them, and makes burdens heavier, and the yoke more 
galling, when the few attempt what only the many can 
accomplish. 

Such do we conceive to be the teaching of the late En- 
cyclical. Such the voice that calms the waves and stills 
the tempest of human passions ; and such the hand that 
steers the bark freighted with its precious cargo of im- 
mortal souls to the secure haven of supreme happiness, 
for which this earthly state, no matter how arranged, is 
but the preparation. 

J. B. PUECELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



80 THE VICKERS AND PUECELL CONTROVERSY. 



EEPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS TO 
ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Gazette, November 7, 1857.) 

Cincinnati, November 5, 1867. 
[The 262d Anniversary of Gunpowder Treason.] 

To Archbishop Pur cell, of Cincinnati: 

Most Reverend Sir: I have waited until now 
before replying to your last effusion, partly because I 
have had something better to do, and partly because I 
thought it would afford you no little gratification and 
delight to be able to associate this reply with an anni- 
versary which must be so full of pleasant historical re- 
membrances to every Roman Catholic who loves free 
thought and " deprecates the union of church and state." 
Permit me, in the first place, in your behalf, to cor- 
rect a false report which some of your enemies have 
been circulating since the appearance of the article in 
the Catholic Telegraph, of October 30th. It has been 
maliciously suggested that you are incapable of pro- 
ducing an article couched in terms of such extraordi- 
nary courtesy, betraying such a cultivated and refined 
taste, coupled with such a display of logical acumen 
and such unexampled candor and honesty; that had 
you produced such a masterpiece of polemical writing, 
you would never have allowed it to go forth without 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 81 

your signature. Of course, nothing but malice and 
desperate ill-will could have suggested such a thing, 
and I joyfully take the first opportunity of freeing you 
from such unjust suspicions. It is perfectly evident to 
all careful readers that although you did not (for some 
reasons best known to yourself) append your signature 
to it, you nevertheless wrote the article ; for do you not, 
in three several places, in referring to a former article 
to which your name was attached, use the first personal 
pronoun: "We argued/' "we said," "we told him be- 
fore"? and do you not say, "we republish a portion of 
our Pastoral of 1862"? Of course you wrote it; noth- 
ing but the most unscrupulous enmity could wish to 
deprive you of the honor which necessarily follows such 
eminent productions. 

A SLIGHT DRAWBACK. 

After this voluntary vindication of your rights, I trust 
you will not take it amiss if, before proceeding to exam- 
ine the essential points of your reply, I make a single 
remark : You seem to have the slight misfortune of see- 
ing things in documents "before you" which are not 
there, and of not seeing things which are there. This, 
unfortunately, slightly detracts from the trustworthiness 
of your representations, and makes the task of replying 
to you somewhat unpleasant. I shall have occasion to 
notice several cases in which this ophthalmic difficulty 
of yours manifests itself. First, in regard to 

"freemen" and "free speech." 

You say that, "in the paper before you," I "insist" 
on having "inflicted no censure" on the "freemen of 
6 



82 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Ohio" for voting against the Constitutional Amend- 
ment. In that paper I never said any such thing; on 
the contrary, I vindicated my right to censure them — 
that is, to express my opinion in regard to their action. 
And this right I never denied even to the Romish Church. 
This was not " the point, friend/' as you very well know. 
The point was that the Romish Church claims not only 
the right "to tell men so," when they "think and speak 
what is wrong," but she claims the right to punish men 
for speaking what is contrary to her doctrines ; what 
they say may be in itself wrong or right. This I stated 
just as plainly "in the paper before you" as I have 
done now. Intelli gib ilia, non intellectual, fero. I would 
suggest your delegating the controversy to some one 
who is not troubled with any of the various species of 
ophthalmia. 

EMERSON. 

No one respects Mr. Emerson more than I do, but I 
do not feel bound by his opinions, especially on matters 
concerning which he has but little knowledge. Now, had 
you searched his writings through, you could scarcely have 
found a paragraph with more blunders in it than the one 
you quoted. In the first place, no sensible, well-read man 
nowadays includes the fifteenth century in the Dark 
Ages; consequently, we do not owe the art of printing 
and the discovery of America to them. Furthermore, 
the Dark Ages neither gave us gunpowder, glass, nor 
chemistry ; and had Mr. Emerson, at the time he wrote 
the paragraph in question, been at all intimately ac- 
quainted with the history of the arts and sciences, he 
never would have said they did. We know that glass, 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 83 

for instance, was used at least one thousand six hundred 
years before the Christian era. Why, we already find 
pictures of glass-blowers on Egyptian monuments. And 
when Mr. Emerson says that " human thought was never 
more active and never produced greater results in any 
period of the world" than in the one under discussion, 
the assertion is simply an historical blunder. But there 
is another point on which this extract from Emerson will 
serve you a sorry trick. Alas ! you really seem doomed 
to perish by your own weapons. Why did not your 
"Guardian Angel" stay your hand before you wrote 
the name of 

ROGER BACON? 

Do you not remember that my original thesis was that 
the Romish Church had never tolerated free thought? 
Had you forgotten the cruel persecutions which this 
same Franciscan monk, Bacon, had to endure from 
the Church on account of his free thought ? Had you 
forgotten that he was condemned propter novitates quas- 
dam suspectasf — that, from 1257 until 1267, he was con- 
tinually persecuted, kept most of the time in prison, and 
prevented from holding any intercourse with the out- 
ward world? Had you forgotten that, in 1278, when 
he was sixty-four years old, he was summoned to Paris, 
where a council of Franciscans, with the Pope's legate 
at their head, condemned his writings and committed 
him to close confinement, and that, for ten years, every 
effort to procure his liberation was in vain ? Had you 
forgotten that, even after his death, the monks feared 
and hated his books so much that they nailed them to 
boards to prevent their being read, and "left them to 



84 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

rot amid dirt and damp?" O, most reverend sir! is 
this what you meant when you said that the Church 
only tells men that they are wrong when she finds them 
so? 

FIRMILIAN. 

I am not at all surprised that you seek to rid your- 
self of this uncomfortable adversary. His bitter oppo- 
sition to the supremacy and infallibility of the Roman 
Bishop has always been a "thorn in the flesh" of the 
Romish Church. She first tried to suppress entirely the 
letter from which I quoted, and it is, therefore, not to 
be found in the editions of Cyprian by Erasmus and 
Manutius. Although it is extant in twenty-six differ- 
ent codices, it was first printed by Guil. Morellius, Paris, 
1564, who was bitterly censured for his temerity by 
Latinus and Pamelius. But the Church, finding it im- 
possible to suppress the letter, tried another expedient: 
she tried to prove it a forgery. And if it were neces- 
sary, dear sir, I could furnish you the names of quite 
a number of persons who tried this game besides your 
redoubtable friend, Marcellinus Molkenbuhr, that great 
critical genius (!), who also wrote a treatise to prove 
that the books of the New Testament were originally 
written in Latin! But even the Romish Church has 
long since given up the forgery-hypothesis; there is no 
longer any controversy on the matter. There is not a 
single church historian or critic, w T hose opinion is worth 
noticing, whether Catholic or Protestant, who does not 
admit the letter to be genuine. Walch, Rettberg, Lard- 
ner, Mosheim, Neander, Milner, Milman, Guericke, Gies- 
eler, Schaaf — all admit its genuineness. Pretty good au- 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 85 

thorities, and plenty of them. But allow me to direct 
your attention to three Roman Catholic authorities, as 
these will probably weigh most with you. The first is 
the celebrated Tillemont, of whom Dupin said : " There 
is nothing which has escaped his exactness, and there 
is nothing obscure or intricate which his criticism has 
not cleared up or disentangled.' ' If you will take the 
trouble to look into the Memoires pour servir a VHis- 
toire Ecclesiastique (tome 4, p. 157, et seq.), you will find 
that his opinion does not coincide with that of your im- 
maculate critic. But let us come a little nearer home. 
If I am not mistaken, Archbishop Kenrick has, in the 
Catholic Church, quite a reputation for scholarship (has 
he not, dear sir?), and yet, in his book on the " Primacy 
of the Apostolic See" (5th ed., p. 116, et. seq.), he quotes 
the letter as genuine. The third authority is the " Church 
Lexicon, or Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology, edited 
by Heinrich Joseph Wetzer and Benedict Welte, (both 
Catholic professors of theology at the Catholic Univer- 
sity of Freiburg), aided by some of the most distinguished 
Catholic scholars in Germany" and published in twelve 
volumes by the well-known Catholic publisher, Herder, 
in Freiburg. I translate literally from vol. 4, p. 74 
(published in 1850) : " Cyprian consulted Firmilian, in 
order to learn from him more accurately the opinion 
and practice of the orientals in the matter in question 
(baptism by heretics) ; and Firmilian, in a long letter, not 
without violence, mockery, and irony, declared himself 
against Pope Stephen, and sought to defend the practice 
of the orientals. This letter, originally written in the Greek 
language, was translated into Latin by Cyprian, and is found 
among Cypriaris Letters as epistola 75. ,, How could you 



86 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

be so in the dark, most reverend sir ? I would suggest 
the propriety of delegating the controversy to some one 
better acquainted with the history of Christian literature 
than you seem to be. 

AUGUSTINE AND AQUINAS. 

In regard to these two men, I wish to ask you a few 
questions, which I beg you to answer without any con- 
tortious or equivocations. Did Augustine, knowing the 
laws against heresy, call upon the civil power to enforce 
them against the Donatists, or did he not ? Did Thomas 
Aquinas j ustify the punishment of heresy by death, or did 
he not? Did I, or did I not, quote, in my last reply, 
the exact language of Aquinas as found not only in Migne, 
but in all editions of this author ? And if I did, by what 
canon of ecclesiastical morals do you say I " pretend to 
quote" it? 

THE SECULAR TRIBUNAL. 

It was, of course, to be expected that you would as- 
sert that the Church had nothing to do with executing 
the sentence of death upon heretics — she handed them 
over to the secular arm (!). Now, most reverend sir, 
allow me to ask you another question, and to beg to 
this also an unequivocal answer. One instance is as 
good as a thousand here. Am I right in supposing 
that, in the year 1600, the ecclesiastical and the secu- 
lar power in Rome were both in the hands of the Church? 
And if so, ivhat power executed Giordano Bruno, who was 
burned there, on the 17th of February of that year, for 
heresy f 

Still further, let me ask you, if the following is one 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 87 

of the forty-one errors of Luther, condemned in the bull 
of Leo X, bearing date June 14, 1520 ? "Hwreticos com- 
buri, est contra voluntatem spiritus" And is the follow- 
ing a correct translation : " To burn heretics is contrary 
to the will of the Holy Spirit"? 

Furthermore, is the following a correct translation of 
one of the closing paragraphs of the bull of Innocent X 
against the errors of Jansen, dated May 31, 1653? "We 
likewise prescribe to all patriarchs, archbishojis, bishops, 
etc., as well as to all inquisitors of heretical depravity, 
that they utterly restrain and repress all those who are 
refractory and rebellious [concerning the matter in hand] 
by means of the above-mentioned pains and penalties, and 
the other suitable remedies juris et facti ; and, also, if it 
should be necessary, by the aid of the secular arm, invoked 
for that purpose" 

Furthermore, is the following a correct translation of 
one of the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council ? " We 
excommunicate and condemn every heresy which exalt- 
eth its face against this holy and Catholic faith. Let 
such persons, when condemned, be left to the secular 
powers, to be punished in a fitting manner ; and let the 
secular powers be admonished and, if need be, compelled 
that they should set forth an oath that, to the utmost of 
their power, they will strive to exterminate all here- 
tics who shall be denounced by the Church. But if any 
temporal lord shall neglect to cleanse his country of this 
heretical filth, let him be bound by the chain of excom- 
munication. If he shall scorn to make satisfaction, let 
it be signified to the Supreme Pontiff, that he may declare 
his vassals to be absolved from their fidelity" Did not 
Pope Pius V do this very thing? Did he not excom- 



88 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

municate Queen Elizabeth, and absolve her subjects from 
their oath of fealty ? 

How dare you, most reverend sir, falsify history by as- 
serting that the Church had nothing to do with the " con- 
summation" of the sentence she passed upon heretics? 

PROGRESS. 

I, too, thank God that " the world has outgrown the 
policy and practice " of putting men to death for an 
opinion. But you will permit me to doubt whether the 
Church has outgrown the principles which led her to 
put men to death for this cause. Allow me to call 
your attention to a fact which did not occur in the 
middle ages, to which you would seem to relegate all 
sympathy with killing men for opinion's sake, but in 
the year of grace 1862. Your brother Archbishop, 
Desprey, of Toulouse, published a pastoral in April, 
year just named, in which he called upon the faithful 
in his diocese to celebrate, on the 16th of May, a "glo- 
rious event, in which, three hundred years ago, the good- 
ness of God and the succoring power of his saints had 
been so plainly manifested." What was this "glorious 
event?" It was the butchery of four thousand Huguenots 
in cold blood, after they had laid down their arms and re- 
ceived the promise of unmolested retreat. I think you 
will agree with me that the progress (?) in the Romish 
Church is of somewhat recent date. So long as Rome 
continues to manufacture saints out of the bloodiest 
mercenaries of the Inquisition, we may well pause and 
reflect. Had your visit to Rome, during the present 
year, most reverend sir, any thing to do with such a 
canonization? 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 89 



THE JESUITS AGAIN. 

I not only say " that the Jesuits' vow binds them to 
things contrary to the known law of God," but I can 
prove it. Do you desire me to quote still further from 
the " Constitutions ?" I will name to you three Jesuit 
manuals of morals, which you undoubtedly have in 
your library, and beg you to look into them before 
proceeding further in this controversy. The first is 
the Compendium Theol. Moralis, by M. Moullet, for- 
merly Professor in Freiburg; the second is Ssettler's 
Commentary on the Sixth Commandment, augmented 
by Abbe Rousselot, Professor at the Seminary in Gren- 
oble; the third is also a Commentary on the Sixth 
Commandment, with a dissertation de matrimonio, by 
Bishop Bouvier, of Mans (10th ed., Paris, 1813). How 
would you like to have me cite, with parallel transla- 
tions, such passages as the one beginning with the fol- 
lowing words, from the first: "Si quis delectatur de cop- 
ula cum muliere nupta" etc. ; or this from the second : 
"Expedit, prudenter et data occasione a mulieribus et et- 
iam a puellis queer ere, utrum eum bestia" etc.; or this 
from the third : "Licet confessiones mulierum excipere, 
cum eis utiliter et honeste conversari, eas visitare vel de- 
center amplecti," etc. f Do, please, look into them, and 
let me know in your next reply whether I shall proceed. 

THE PASTORAL. 

There are several other points which I should like to 
notice, but with a word concerning your " pastoral " I 
will conclude. Of course, you know that the Encycli- 
cal and Syllabus were addressed to you as well as to all 



90 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

other " patriarchs, primates, archbishops" etc., and that 
you are bound by every word of it But in writing your 
pastoral you probably remembered the instructions 
which Pius VII addressed to his nuntius in Vienna, in 
the year 1805, in which the following words occur: 
" We live, alas ! in times of such great misfortune and 
such humiliation for the spouse of Christ, that the Church 
is not only unable to make use of her most holy principles 
of deserved severity against the rebellious enemies of the 
faith, but she dare not even mention them with- 
out DETRIMENT." 

May I not beg you, in conclusion, if you are still de- 
sirous of having the controversy continued, that you 
will delegate your side to some one who recognizes the 
common principles of grammar, logic, and morals ? 
With due respect, most reverend sir, 

THOMAS VICKERS, 

Minister of the First Congregational Society. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 91 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL TO REV. THOMAS 
VICKERS. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, November 13, 1867.) 

Rev. Sir: In your lucubration, published in the 
Cincinnati Gazette, of the 7th inst., you intimate a wish 
to have my side of this controversy delegated to some 
one who recognizes the common principles of grammar, 
logic, and morals. Permit me, therefore, to inquire how 
much a quarter you will ask for teaching one as dull as 
I am grammar? I shall not, however, hire you as a 
competent pedagogue to teach me logic or morals, for 
you know, dear Mr. Vickers, nemo dot quod non habet. 
You have set me the example of larding your letters 
with Latin, and you can not find it amiss that I follow it 
grammatically. And, furthermore, I give you full credit 
for the statement of a "false report" which, you say, 
"some of my enemies had been circulating since the 
appearance of my article in the Telegraph, of the 30th 
October." Of course you heard it, or you never would 
have said you had. There must be a basis of truth 
for a flourish of rhetoric. And you wrote your last 
on the 5th November for the reasons given. These 
reasons were, doubtless, very satisfactory to your own 
refined mind and feelings. But you will excuse me for 
so much freethinking and speaking as to hint that, on 



92 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

that memorable occasion of the so-called " gunpowder 
plot," you would have taken a prominent part as Cecil's 
spy and Tresham's accomplice, if not Catesby's mur- 
derer, if you did not hold the dark lantern for Guy 
Fawkes, or import the thirty barrels of powder from 
Holland, or cart them from Lambeth, or cover them 
with old iron and firewood in the cellar of the Parlia- 
ment house, and been inspired, like King James, " by 
the Holy Ghost," to call this mad enterprise of nine 
deluded fanatics a Popish plot. You see, my dear, 
amiable Mr. Vickers, I would rather think this of you 
than call you a scavenger that rakes up the kennels of 
history to fling dirt at the Catholics. It might be that 
some enemy, judging from the hot haste with which you 
fled from a discussion on free thought to the easier dec- 
lamation about persecution, would suggest that this was 
for you a more congenial occupation. But I would not 
believe them, would you? Whatever your motives 
were, I thank you sincerely, cordially for the character 
you give Martin Luther in your sermon in Hopkins' 
Hall, on the 4th November. It was exceedingly kind 
on your part, if not a judicial blindness, to tell the 
truth so plainly about the " Father of the Keformation." 
I am delighted at the opportunity thus given, to call 
the attention of my beloved Catholic flock and of all sin- 
cere non-Catholic inquirers for truth to this matrix and 
womb of your new religion, of whom you say in your 
eloquent effusion : " Honor and praise be unto his name 
to-day, and the love of men be his unto the latest gen- 
eration." Here it is : " At one time he, Martin Luther, 
rails at reason as a harlot, who, wholly given over to 
vanity, takes the soul captive with her deadly wiles. At 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 93 

another, he treats the Bible in a manner wholly arbi- 
trary, rejects or retains the individual books only as 
they happen to coincide with, or contradict his own 
opinion ; he calls one an epistle of straw ; says of an- 
other, that it contains a number of most excellent bits 
of fun ; and of a third, that it has neither boots nor 
spurs, but rides in its socks, just as he himself did when 
he w T as in the monastery." After thus practically de- 
spoiling man of the only faculty by which he holds the 
scepter of this world, or communes with the next before 
receiving the gift of revelation, the Arch-reformer robs 
him of free will, which he makes and calls a slave — 
" slave-will." The human will he makes a brute-beast — 
a horse — " if God rides it, it goes to God ; if the devil, 
it goes to the devil." This makes man a mere machine. 
It deprives him of manhood. It takes from him all the 
responsibility of crime, all the merit of virtue. And 
Luther did not recoil from the consequences of his in- 
novation. " Sin boldly," he exclaimed, " sin deeply ; the 
more you sin the more you honor faith, the dearer child 
you are of God." And this, among others, was the ad- 
vice he gave to his melancholy friend John Weller. 
"Drink," says the old debauchee to him, "drink and 
amuse yourself with Kate." Glory, honor, and praise 
be to the German Catholics of this day, and the love of 
man be theirs to the latest generation, w T ho adhere to 
the religion of their fatherland, refusing to identify them- 
selves with the spawn of such a reformation as he en- 
gendered. What think you, Rev. sir, of this portion 
of my answer? Do you see yourself in this "mirror? " 
Does it fairly reflect your features — your grammar, your 
logic, and your morals? You say "the old religion 



94 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

used the Church, the new one used the Bible, for — a 
"crutch." This admission plainly shows that the "Ref- 
ormation" was a principle, a process, that not one of 
the great reformers had any real historical and critical 
knowledge of the Bible — therefore, "reason and con- 
science" were taken captive by the Bible, and all the 
movements and relations of life were fettered to its let- 
ter." Think of this, young men, and old men, Christian 
and Evangelical associations of Cincinnati, and break 
your crutch, and put this old mutilated Bible — muti- 
lated by Martin Luther and Rev. Mr. Vickers — in the 
alembic of conscience and reason, and take for your 
mental pabulum the residuum. 

What will be this residuum? If you are not expert 
enough chemists to discover it yourselves, ask Mr. Vick- 
ers and his aids to please take you into their labora- 
tory, you will soon learn that Christ, whom you make 
the head of your religion, "is a theological fiction;" that 
the Holy Spirit is not any more than Christ, very God, 
but a theological fiction ; that the devil is a theological 
fiction — but, for your lives, do not suggest to the pro- 
fessor that when the devil gets a grip of him — as he 
surely will, "except he do penance" — it will be no fic- 
tion. If you told him this it might disturb the nice 
analysis. You will learn, of course, as a corollary, that 
hell, like Satan, is but an oriental metaphor; and that 
when the Gospel says Christ cast seven devils out of the 
sinful woman, he only cast seven oriental metaphors out 
of her ; that when Jehovah forbids coveting, he is not 
to be obeyed, for he forbids free thought; and that in 
Deuteronomy xvii: 10, 11, 12, where he commands a 
man not to follow the dictates of his conscience or rea- 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 95 

son, but simply to obey the judgment of the priest, and 
that in penalty of disobedience and freethinking, "he 
shall die the death," he is more of a despot than any 
freeman in Ohio, New York, or Pennsylvania. 

With this intelligence of the Bible, go, gentlemen of 
the Bible Society, and circulate these emasculated, mu- 
tilated, misinterpreted Scriptures, no longer the word of 
God, but Mr. Vickers' ; or, if you will be honester still, 
tell your beneficiaries, the Bible is but a crutch, and the 
sooner they break it, in the name of conscience and rea- 
son, the better. And now, my dear Mr. Vickers, who 
make of the Bible what you make of the Reformation, 
a "principle," a "process" from which you evolve all 
the startling impieties I have enumerated, " even to the 
denying of our only Sovereign and Lord, Jesus Christ," 
do you not see that you are of those " certain men," of 
whom St. Jude speaks, verse 4, "who were of old marked 
out for this judgment " (condemnation) ? Is it not the re- 
jection of all the vital truths of Christianity in which — 
as Catholic writers like Bossuet have so often pre- 
dicted — freethinking on religious matters drives its 
votaries from one error to another, until they find no 
resting-place but in the abyss of atheism? If you see 
not this, you see not what the Bible, the best of books, 
the book by excellence, sets before you. If you see it 
not, I counsel thee, with that blessed book, " to buy eye- 
salve" (Rev. iii: 13), to cure thy foul ophthalmia. 

Well, you quar*rel with Emerson. It is a family jar ; 
I leave you to settle it as best you may. 

But Roger Bacon ! Why, sir, when you laud him, 
and laud Luther, you forget that it was in the bosom 
of our benighted Church they acquired, the one all his 



96 THE VICKERS AXD PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

science, the other all his learning. The one was a Fran- 
ciscan, the other an Augustinian friar, priest. Bacon, 
over whom you shed such crocodile tears, was called by 
our Church, and by his brethren, " Doctor admirabilis," 
the admirable Doctor, for his extraordinary knowledge 
of astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics. If his re- 
ligious superior forbade him to lose his own precious 
time and turn the heads of his brother monks by writ- 
ing and talking of alchemy, the philosopher's stone, 
judicial astrology, divining wands, and the making of a 
brazen head that would answer the questions proposed 
to it, this restraint did no serious injury to Bacon or 
to science. 

You make a wonderful fuss about Firmilian. Why, 
sir, can you have so soon forgotten what I said of him 
so recently, that if he had used such coarse language 
in addressing the Pope, he only illustrated the more 
clearly the freethinking and speaking allowed or ex- 
ercised in the Catholic Church? And if I gave his 
memory the benefit of a serious doubt as to the authen- 
ticity of the letter, the very array of names you quote 
to prove it genuine, goes only to show that many others 
regarded it as the spurious production of an African 
Donatist. And now, with all my respect for the cele- 
brated Tillemont, and the little respect I have for many 
things said by his eulogist, Dupin, allow me to tell you 
that even Tillemont occasionally — like the " bonus Ho- 
merus" — napped. It would lead me off the road to 
quote for this remark the learned Alban Butler. But 
if Firmilian said all that is imputed to him, and more, 
it was on the well-known occasion of the controversy 
about the validity of baptism, conferred by heretics, in 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 97 

which St. Cyprian was mistaken and the Pope was not. 
Then Firmilian should have spoken as an excited par- 
tisan, forgetting that his principal — that is, St. Cypri- 
an — called " the chair of Peter the principal church, the 
origin of the sacerdotal unity, whither perfidy can not 
find access." (Ep. 59 ad Corneliwn^o. 10, p. 265.) As 
Butler says, " The warmth Cyprian betrayed in this con- 
troversy he much repented of, as appears by the book 
he afterward wrote on Patience." Let us hope that if 
Firmilian erred, like Cyprian for a time, like Cyprian 
he repented. But be this as it may, his opinion has not 
a feather's weight in the question of the Pope's suprem- 
acy. You ask me questions about Augustine, Aquinas, 
and yourself. Before answering — and I shall answer 
most categorically — allow me to congratulate you on get- 
ting into such good company. Firstly, then, St. Augus- 
tine, when reproached by the Donatists with the perse- 
cuting laws enforced against them, replied : " If any 
severity inconsistent with Christian lenity has, at any 
time, been exercised against you, it displeases all true 
Christians." "No good man in the Catholic Church 
approves of the capital punishment of a heretic. (Lib. 
Contra Ep. Parmen, Ch. XIII. Contra Crescon. lib. 
Ill, Ch. 4, No. 55.) 

When the Circumcellions, by acts of violence and 
bloodshed, had provoked the severity of the magistrate, 
he remonstrated with the Proconsul in Africa, beseech- 
ing him, through Jesus Christ, not to punish them capi- 
tally : " We wish not their death but their correction." 
(Ep. C. olim C. XXVII.) 

Secondly, Aquinas : I have already quoted his decla- 
ration, which is the same as Augustine's — that the 
7 



98 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Church's province is mercy. If they both left the vin- 
dication of human laws to the secular tribunal, it is no 
more than every honest man and citizen would do to- 
day if heretics made war upon society. You remember 
how near we were once to a conflict with the Mormons 
for threatened resistance to the laws of the land, and 
why the people of Nauvoo expelled them from their 
borders. 

Thirdly, I answer yourself by saying that you grossly 
wronged St. Augustine when you made him the author 
of persecution for heresy whom others have followed. 
With the Bible and the civil law they regarded as 
criminals the false prophets and the false teachers who 
brought in sects of perdition, "denying the Lord who 
bought them," (St. Peter, 2d.Ep. Ch. II. V. 1,) and who 
sought to enforce their sectarianism and lawlessness by 
the sword. The third and fourth councils of Lateran 
were mixed assemblies of the spiritual and temporal 
powers. While the Church approves of the enactments 
passed "against offenders by whom every regard for 
decorum was removed, the marriage tie dissolved, and 
divine and human laws subverted," (vid: Ep. Sti. Leo. 
ad Turibium) : yet the Council (4th Sec.) expressly for- 
bids clergymen to sign their names to any document 
connected with capital punishment. I need not here 
remind you that Catholics in these United States have 
not been the authors, but the victims, of intolerance and 
oppression. The faggots, fire, and flames which you 
read of, where they w T ere not named in the text of 
Aquinas, were used unmercifully against us, as they 
had been against the unoffending Quakers, in Charles- 
town, Mass., Philadelphia, and other places, even from 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 99 

the days of our colonial bondage to Great Britain. 
And the House of Refuge, where no priest is allowed 
to speak to scores of Catholic children, some of them 
immured for years for trivial offenses ; and the public 
schools, for whose erection and endowment we Catholics 
are taxed so pitilessly, should shame you and every big- 
oted auxiliary and ungenerous foe to silence and pen- 
ance. You see, sir, that our world "has not outgrown the 
practice" 

I shall not follow you, sir, where you seem so anxious 
to lead — into the discussion of immoralities so falsely 
attributed to the writings of Catholic societies or theo- 
logians. The pretended monk, Leahy, who edified the 
cities and some of the Protestant pulpits of the United 
States with such obscene caricatures, may serve you for 
a model and exemplar. You know he finished his ca- 
reer by committing murder, and a sentence for life to 
the Wisconsin Penitentiary — from which the wretch 
was reprieved, if we are informed aright, at the prayer 
of one of the worthiest of Catholic prelates, Right 
Rev. Bishop Henni, of Milwaukee. After his release 
he begged permission to go through the country refut- 
ing his own calumnies, but we spurned him, knowing 
that they "who touch pitch will be defiled by it;" so 
do I scorn to follow you in his wake. You who rob 
the world of its God and Redeemer, you who nickname 
the Bible a crutch; what have you ever done for society 
or religion ? Where are your hospitals, your orphan 
asylums ; your refuges for penitents, for any of all the 
various forms of human misery? What wounds have 
you healed, what tears have you dried, what sorrows 
have you soothed, what death-beds have you sanctified, 



100 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

you who make Christ a "theological fiction," and the 
Bible "a crutch/' to be cast away? The reason and 
the conscience which you vainly, not to say wickedly, 
seek to substitute for both, will sadly fail you, as they do 
humanity in the hour of peril and of sorest need. They 
have lured their followers in all ages into pits and ditches. 
Reason, which man's iniquity soon perverted, taught him 
to worship his passions for gods, and conscience was its 
accomplice. 

Bruno, whom you should have called by his Italian 
name of Giordano Bruni, was, after he had doffed the 
Dominican habit and apostatized, driven from Geneva 
by Calvin and Beza, with whom you must first settle the 
account of his persecution. He denied, like you, the most 
important truths of religion ; those held by Jews and 
Christians having been classed by him with the fables 
of pagans and idolaters. " Reason and conscience" he 
made, like you, the only arbiters of vice and virtue — 
and this as he understood them. The extravagance of 
his imagination equaled that of his logic. From Wit- 
temburg, where he turned Lutheran, he was also ban- 
ished for his assaults on all who dared oppose his irre- 
ligious follies. He then returned to his native country, 
and continuing to dogmatize and abuse the Pope, as the 
" beast," he met the fate he merited, for the Pope was tem- 
poral as well as spiritual ruler, and bound by his duty 
to preserve the States of the Church from the fury of 
the fanatic. In this the Pope did nothing but what 
Pio Nono would have had a right to do had Garibaldi 
been captured by his little army in the late invasion 
of Rome. Had the infidel Buccaneer of both hemi- 
spheres succeeded, he would have, like an hyena, broken 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 101 

into the tombs of the holy apostles and scattered their 
sacred ashes to the winds; he would have plundered 
churches and profaned the tabernacles of the Holy Eu- 
charist, and filled the Eternal City with ruins. Under 
such circumstances, I say openly, and you may make 
whatever use you please of the admission, the death of 
the miscreant would have been a duty and a benefit. 

I am, sir, in the true faith and love of Christ, whom 
you are every day blaspheming, Yours, 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati, 



102 THE VICKEES AND PUECELL CONTEOVEESY. 



REJOINDEK BY REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Gazette, November 22, 1867.) 

To the Editor of the Cincinnati Gazette : 

If the honest and intelligent readers of the Gazette, 
have attentively read the last letter, which Archbishop 
Purcell has seen fit to address to me, there is little oc- 
casion to burden your columns with a reply. At any 
rate, a brief survey of some of the peculiarities of the 
controversy will suffice. 

I may say, in passing, that inasmuch as the greater 
part of my last letter was taken up with the treatment 
of Popes, Councils, so-called Fathers, and great digna- 
taries of the Romish Church, it would seem, to say the 
least, to be somewhat indecorous, and to betray a want 
of se/f-respect, when the Archbishop accuses me of 
"raking up the kennels of history." Still, I have 
no objection — simm cuiquef 

THE ARCHBISHOP'S METHOD OF DISCUSSION. 

At the close of my letter of November 5th, I re- 
quested the Archbishop, if he wished to continue the 
controversy, to delegate his side to some one who recog- 
nized the common principles of grammar, logic, and 
morals. It is now in place to develop more clearly why 
I did this, and why I was compelled to do it. There is 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 103 

not, I am sure, in the whole literature of the old scho- 
lastic wrangles, a parallel to the controversial method 
of the Archbishop. An instance or two will suffice to 
exhibit this method in all its archiepiscopal brilliancy. 
In my sermon of October 14th, I had referred to cer- 
tain passages in the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas, as 
showing that Aquinas justified the burning of heretics, 
and I had indicated the exact places where these pas- 
sages were to be found. Thereupon Archbishop Pur- 
cell had the audacity to deny that any such passages 
occurred in the places indicated, meekly offering to ex- 
hibit his copy of the Summa to any one who might visit 
him, but taking good care not to print the words of 
Aquinas. In reply I recited the exact words in the 
original, taking them from the exact places originally 
assigned. In my sermon I had not pretended to cite 
the precise words ; I had spoken of the " burning " of 
heretics, because I knew that the horrible meaning of 
the pious ecclesiastical brocard : " ecclesia non sitit san- 
guinem (the Church does not thirst after blood)" found 
its exposition in the " merciful " substitution of the torch 
for the sword. I knew how Huss, and Bruno, and Sa- 
vonarola, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition had 
perished. I knew that the record of the " merciful dis- 
position of the Church, " of which the Archbishop speaks 
again and again, was written, not in blood, but in flames. 
Now, the precise words of Aquinas, as I afterward cited 
them literally, w r ere, that heretics were to be killed 
("occidi"), or, in another passage, exterminated from the 
world ("a mundo exterminari"), or, in still another pas- 
sage, not to be liberated from the sentence of death (" non 
tamen ut liberentur a sententia mortis"). It would seem 



104 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

that these words were sufficiently explicit; although 
Aquinas did not specify the method by which heretics 
were to be exterminated, the method of the Church was 
burning. And these words were conclusive against the 
Archbishop, for he himself had adduced Aquinas as one 
of the illustrious many who attested the freedom of 
thought in the Catholic Church. Now, what did the 
Archbishop say or do after this? He did not dare di- 
rectly to deny the genuineness of the passages I had 
quoted ; but he dared to write a pretended editorial, 
from which he omitted his signature, and to insinuate 
that the words I had cited were not genuine, by men- 
tioning them as words which I " pretended to quote." 

He, furthermore, resorted to the subterfuge of claim- 
ing that the Church had nothing to do with the exter- 
mination of heretics, because she simply handed them 
over for punishment to the temporal power ! To this it 
would have been a sufficient answer, that whenever this 
"handing over" took place the Church had complete 
control of the temporal power ; but waiving this, I called 
the attention of the Archbishop to the case of Giordano 
Bruno, who was burned at Rome, where both the tem- 
poral and ecclesiastical powers were in the hands of the 
Pope. And now, mark the triumphant rejoinder of the 
Archbishop in his last letter. He admits that the Pope, 
who was " temporal as well as spiritual ruler," burned 
Bruno ; but he says that the name of the victim was 
Giordano Bruni, and not Bruno; that Bruno or Bruni 
" apostatized ; " that he was " driven from Geneva by 
Calvin and Beza ; " that he was " banished from Wit- 
tenberg (where he turned Lutheran) for his assaults on 
all who dared oppose his irreligious follies;" that he 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS TICKERS. 105 

" returned to his native country, and continuing to dog- 
matize and abuse the Pope" he "met the fate he merited" 
But the Archbishop does not stop here. He says, with 
unexampled candor, that it would have been the "duty" 
of Pio JS"ono to treat Garibaldi, if he had caught him, 
in just the same manner ! ! ! 

I need make no comments on this brazen and blood- 
thirsty utterance. The public now knows the real sen- 
timents of the Archbishop, and will judge him accord- 
ingly. But the Archbishop's zeal again betrays his 
limping scholarship. 

The simple fact is, that Bruno was not "driven from 
Geneva by Calvin and Beza ;" that he never " became a 
Lutheran;" and that he never was "banished from Wit- 
tenberg;" therefore I have no need to "first settle the 
account of his persecution " with the Protestant reform- 
ers. From what trustworthy (?) Catholic historian did 
the Archbishop get his information this time ? 

FIRMILIAN AGAIN. 

Another instance of Archbishop Purcell's polemical 
practice. I had occasion to allude to Firniilian's letter 
to Cyprian. In his article of October 30th, the Arch- 
bishop pompously announced that, in citing this letter, 
I " floundered in the mire again," and added : " If the 
gentleman (Mr. Vickers) reads the dissertation in 4to, 
written by Marcellinus Molkenbuhr, and printed in 
Munster, Westphalia, in 1790, he will find that the let- 
ter in question was falsely attributed to Firmilian, and 
that it was, on the contrary, the production of an 
African Donatist of the fourth century." In reply, I 
showed that this man Molkenbuhr was an idiot, who had, 



106 THE TICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

among others, written a treatise to prove that the books 
of the New Testament were originally composed in Latin, 
and not in Greek, and that the most eminent Catholic di- 
vines of our day, including Archbishop Kenrick, recog- 
nized the genuineness of Firniilian's letter. All this 
does not disconcert the Archbishop in the least; al- 
though he had a moment before not simply doubted the 
genuineness of the letter, but pronounced it spurious, 
and accused me of "floundering in the mire/' because 
I did not know that it was spurious, he has now the 
ecclesiastical candor to write : " If I give his (Firniil- 
ian's) memory the benefit of a serious doubt as to the 
authenticity of the letter, the very array of names you 
quote to prove it genuine goes only to show that many 
others regarded it as the spurious production of an Afri- 
can Donatist" What a brilliant specimen of archiepis- 
copal logic! 

EMERSON AGAIN. 

Another fine specimen of archiepiscopal dialectics. 
The Archbishop has the misfortune to quote Emerson 
to prove that the so-called "Dark Ages" were " ages of 
light," but when I show him that Emerson did not un- 
derstand what he was talking about, he turns round and 
exclaims, with the most charming nonchalance : " Well, 
it is a family jar [between you and Mr. Emerson], I 
leave you to settle it as best you may " (!) 

QUESTION AND ANSWER. 

Nothing, however, is so characteristic of the conduct 
of the Archbishop, during this controversy, as the man- 
ner in w T hich he has asked and answered questions. 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 



107 



There are, in general, two sorts of weapons on which 
he has wholly relied, and which he has used alternately 
as convenience suited. On the one hand, he thought to 
annihilate me by throwing high-sounding names, the 
titles of ponderous folios, and old cathedrals at me ; and 
on the other, he cunningly and (I might say) impu- 
dently sought to make me commit myself on points of 
Christian doctrine, wholly irrelevant to the discussion, 
so as to damage me in the estimation of orthodox Prot- 
estants, and thus destroy the influence of any facts or 
arguments I might bring against him. Now, although 
I did not for a moment recognize his right to catechise 
me on matters of doctrine, I, nevertheless, answered his 
questions simply and directly ; and, by allowing my ser- 
mon on the " Rise and Progress of Protestantism," to be 
printed gratuitously, gave him material for the greater 
part of his last coarse diatribe, which is mainly devoted 
to inflaming the prejudices of Protestants against me. 

But what does the Archbishop do when I ask him to 
answer questions pertinent to the discussion t He, w T ith 
a single exception, already noticed, either pretends to 
answer them "most categorically," but does not come 
within a thousand miles of them, or he proceeds as if 
they had never been asked. In my last letter, for in- 
stance, I asked him some very pointed questions, which 
required a direct answer in the affirmative or negative. 
It will be interesting to look at them again, and at the 
treatment they receive. 



QUESTIONS. 

1. "Did Augustine, knowing 
the laws against heresy, call 
upon the civil power to enforce 



ANSWERS. 

1. Two passages quoted from 
Augustine to show that he did 
not approve of punishing here- 



108 THE VICKERS AND PUHCELL CONTROVERSY. 



them against the Donatists, or 
did he not?" 



2. " Did Thomas Aquinas jus- 
tify the punishment of heresy by 
death, or did he not?" 

3. " Did I, or did I not, quote, 
in my last reply, the exact lan- 
guage of Aquinas, as found not 
only in Migne, but in all editions 
of this author ? and if I did, by 
what canon of ecclesiastical mor- 
als do you say I ' pretended to 
quote' it?" 



4. "Is the following one of 
the forty-one heresies of Luther, 
condemned by the bull of Leo 
X, bearing date of June 14th, 
1520? 'To BURN (comburi) her- 
etics is contrary to the will of 
the Holy Spirit,'" 

5. "Did Innocent X, in his 
bull against the heresies of Jan- 
sen (May 31, 1653), direct all 
archbishops, etc., to utterly re- 
strain and repress, by means of 
pains and penalties, all adher- 
ents of Jansen, and to call in 
the aid of the secular arm, if nec- 
essary, to that end?" 

6. '"Did the Fourth Lateran 
Council decree that the secular 
powers be admonished, and, if 
need be, compelled, to take 
an oath that, to the utmost of 
their power, they will strive to 

EXTERMINATE ALL HERETICS 
DENOUNCED BY THE CHURCH ? " 



tics with death, or with a "se- 
verity inconsistent with Chris- 
tian lenity" (whatever that may 
mean). Not answered at all. 

2. The repetition of a quota- 
tion, dishonestly torn from its 
context, as I have previously 
shown. No answer. 

3. "You grossly wronged Au- 
gustine (!) when you made him 
the author of persecution for 
heresy." {Ego de caseo loquor, 
tic de creta respondes. And, by 
the way, what I said of Augus- 
tine was not that he was "the au- 
thor of persecution for heresy," 
but that he was "the first man 
in the Occident to elaborate a the- 
or-y for compulsion in religious 
matters for the persecution of 
heretics.") 

4. No answer. 



5. Altum silentium. 



6. "The Fourth Council of 
Lateran was a mixed assembly 
of the spiritual and temporal 
powers" (!). 

(Another dishonest subter- 
fuge. The Archbishop knows 
that, under Innocent III, the 
secular princes were but the 
slaves of the Church; that In- 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 



109 



7. "Finally, to cap the cli- 
max, I asked the Archbishop 
whether his recent visit to Home 
had any thing to do with elevat- 
ing a certain bloody inquisitor 
to saintship in the Koman Cath- 
olic Church?" 



nocent, by whose authority the 
Council was assembled, and who 
controlled all its actions, claimed 
to be the temporal ruler of the 
whole earth. JRomanus Pontifez 
non puri hominis, sed veri Dei 
vicem gerit in terris. Inn. Lib. 
I, ep. 335. Dominus Petro non 
solum universam Ecdesiam, sed 
toturn reliquit sceculum gubernan- 
dum. Inn. Lib. II, ep. 209. 

The Archbishop furthermore 
knows that the Council of Trent 
was also a " mixed assembly," 
and that its canons and decrees 
are none the less binding on 
him on that account. 

7. Altissimum silentium* 



HERESY AND PERSECUTION. 

But the Archbishop accuses me of " fleeing (?) in hot 
haste from a discussion on free thought to the easier 
declamation about persecution.' ' Was the Archbishop, 
like his "bonus Homerus," asleep when he wrote this? 
or did he suppose that it made no difference whether 
he wrote sense or nonsense, so long as the name of an 
Archbishop was appended to it? Free thought and 
persecution ! Is not this just what we have been talk- 
ing about all the time? Did I not, in the very first 
address, assert that, "wherever free thought attempted 
to show itself, the Church immediately crushed it out?" 
Was not this persecution with a vengeance? And was 



110 THE VICKERS AND PUKCELL CONTROVERSY. 

it not this very assertion at which the Archbishop took 
such great offense ? What need, then, of " fleeing " ? 

But if any one has "fled," it is the Archbishop him- 
self. He has fled from the most notorious facts of his- 
tory, and it is impossible to get him to face them. He 
has sought, by every artifice, to maintain the most 
untenable of all possible propositions — that the Romish 
Church allows liberty of conscience, and never persecutes 
for opinion's sake. I purpose examining one or two more 
witnesses on this point before leaving the matter. The 
first is Cardinal Bellarmin (1542-1621). What does he 
say? In the twenty-first chapter of the third book of 
his work, entitled "De Laicis," he teaches and proves at 
length "that heretics, condemned by the Church, may be 
punished with temporal punishment, and even with death " 
{posse hcereticos ab Ecclesia damnatos temporalibus parnis, 
etiam morte mulctari). In the following chapter (the 
twenty-second), he answers various objections ; among 
others, the one that the Church had never burnt here- 
tics, and says that such an objection could only arise 
from ignorance or willful misstatement; "for that here- 
tics were often burned by the Church may be proved by 
adducing a few from many examples " {nam quod hcere- 
tici sint scepa ab Ecclesia combusti, ostendi potest, si ad- 
ducamm pauca exempla de mirftis). Another objection 
is, that experience shows that terror is not useful. Bel- 
larmin replies: "Experience proves the contrary; for 
the Donatists, Manichaens, and Albigenses were routed 
and annihilated by arms" {experientia est contrarium: 
nam Donatistce, Manichcei, et Albigenses armis profiigati 
et extincti sunt). Rather explicit, is he not? 

The next witness is Peter Dens ("reverendus ac eru- 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. Ill 

ditissimus dominus"). In his " Theologia, ad usum sem- 
inarorium et sacrce Theologies alumnorum," printed at 
Mechlin, " superiorum permissu," in the edition of 1845 
(vol. 2, pp. 332, 333), under the heading, " de poznis 
criminis hceresis" he advocates the punishment of her- 
etics by death, and quotes the very passage which the 
Archbishop says I "pretended to quote" from Aquinas! 

This book was first published in the latter half of 
the last century, but, in the year 1808, the Romish 
clergy of Dublin unanimously agreed that it was "the 
best work, and the safest guide in theology for the Irish 
clergy;" and it is still regarded as high authority. 

The next witness is Pope Gregory XVI. In his en- 
cyclical letter, published in 1832, he calls liberty of con- 
science " an absurdity, a delirium," and the freedom of 
the press a thing " most foul, and never to be enough 
execrated and detested." 

The next is the famous Cardinal Pacca, the Pope's 
Prime Minister. In the same year (1832) he wrote: 
"If, in certain circumstances, prudence compels us to 
tolerate them \i. e., the liberty of worship and the lib- 
erty of the press], as one tolerates a less evil to avoid 
a greater, such doctrines can not ever be presented by a 
Catholic as good, or as a desirable thing." Furthermore, 
one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the present 
day (Perrone, I, 265) says : " Religious toleration is im- 
pious and absurd," and he goes to great trouble to prove 
it so. 

But the animus of the Romish Church is best shown 
by what she, at this moment (according to the Pontifi- 
calia Romana, de Consecratione Episcoporum, Mechlinise, 
1855, vol. I, p. 84, seq.), requires of every bishop in the 



112 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

ceremony of his consecration. Among other questions, 
the bishop elect is asked, "Dost thou curse, also, every 
heresy raising itself against this Holy Catholic Church ? " 
He answers, " I do curse it." This is ratified by the oath 
of consecration. Having sworn to defend, against every 
one, the Roman Papacy and the royalties of St. Peter, 
and to observe, and cause to be observed by others, the 
rules of the sacred fathers, the apostolic decrees, ordi- 
nances or disposals, reservations, provisions, and com- 
mands/' he adds : "Heretics, schismatics, and rebels against 
our Lord (the Pope), or his successors, I will, to the ut- 
most of my power, persecute and assail." (Hcereticos, 
schismaticos, et rebelles eidem domino nostro vel successor- 
ibus prcedictis pro posse persequar et oppugnabo.) 
Now what, in the face of all the facts I have cited, 
does it amount to w T hen the Archbishop raves about 
Circumcellions, false prophets, false teachers, persecuted 
Quakers, colonial bondage to Great Britain, house of ref- 
uge, apostate monks, etc.? "Quid enim est tarn furiosum 
quam verborum sonitus inanis, nulla subjectd sentential" 

THE MONK LEAHY. 

Before concluding, it may be well to notice one thing 
more. The name of one of the apostate monks, one 
Leahy, is flung at me by the Archbishop in his last 
letter. It is the only new name, I believe, which he 
has vouchsafed, this time, to bring into the controversy. 
This man Leahy, the Archbishop says, committed mur- 
der. I trust that I am not to be held answerable for the 
crimes of all the apostate monks, for I am not one of 
them. Of Leahy, especially, I know nothing — proba- 
bly because I was in Germany when his crime w T as com- 



REPLY OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 113 

mitted. But had the Archbishop forgotten, when he 
cited this apostate monk, what he had said, a moment 
before, in the same letter, about other monks? Had 
he forgotten that he apostrophized me in the words: 
"Why, sir, when you laud him (Roger Bacon) and 
laud Luther, you forget that it was in the bosom of 
our benighted Church they acquired — the one all his 
science, the other all his learning? The one was a 
Franciscan, the other an Augustinian friar — priest." 
Now, if the Archbishop thus insists that the Church 
deserves all the credit of Bacon's science and Luther's 
learning, must he not, pari ratione, vindicate to his Church 
all the credit for Leahy's murder f 

But enough, and more than enough. In conclusion, 
I will only glance at 

WHAT THE CONTROVERSY HAS SETTLED. 

Yes, there are some things which this controversy has 
already definitely settled. Not only a recognition of 
the common principles of grammar, logic, and morals, 
is necessary to the participants in such a controversy 
as this, but also a thorough acquaintance with the sub- 
ject in all its branches and bearings, and, last, but not 
least, the ability to keep one's temper. Now I do not 
hesitate to say, that no fair-minded, intelligent person, 
who has followed the course of the controversy, can help 
seeing that Archbishop Purcell has been grievously at 
fault in all these respects. He has hitherto had at least 
the reputation of scholarship — nay, I understand he has 
been regarded as almost infallible in this direction ; 
he has hitherto had the reputation of being mild and 
humane in feeling, polished and courteous in manner; 

a 



114 THE VICKERS AND PTJRCELL CONTROVERSY. 

these were illusions, which he has done his best to dispel. 
I trust he is satisfied with the result. Of one thing I 
am sure — his "warfare is accomplished;" he will have 
no more controversies — at least, not of this sort — for no 
one will have sufficient respect for his opinion, or suffi- 
cient confidence in his honesty of purpose, to run the 
risk of being a mark for his coarse and brutal invec- 
tive. 

As for me, I can only say, that neither the foaming 
anathemas of Archbishop Purcell, nor the letters threat- 
ening personal violence, which some of his "beloved 
Catholic flock" have troubled themselves to write me, 
will prevent me from denouncing bigotry, intolerance, 
and mendacity whenever and wherever it seems to be 
my duty. 

THOMAS VICKERS, 

Minister of the First Congregational Society. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY. 115 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, December 4, 1867.) 
Text.—" Their God is a fiction, their Bible a crutch." 

Rev. Mr. Vickers, in the Cincinnati Gazette, of No- 
vember 22d, plays Punchinello in the Italian puppet 
show. When his antagonist had left him floored on the 
stage, Punchinello, finding himself alone, jumps up with 
a swagger and cries out " Victory." 

In his conceited self-glorification he forgets all the 
ignorance and inconsistency he had manifested, and false 
statements he had made in his encounter with me, and 
winds up with a statement of what the controversy has 
settled. 

I shall follow his example, and as the Cincinnati Ga- 
zette did not publish my last two letters, I shall disturb 
his false security by giving those who seek the truth an 
opportunity, through the columns of the Catholic Tele- 
graph, to " hear the other side," or apply the rule, as a 
Latin scholar might prefer, of " audi alteram partem" 
1st. Mr. Vickers, in his speech at the laying of 
the corner-stone of the German Lutheran Church of 
St. John, in this city, professed to have been chosen to 
express the sympathy of the American population with 
the occasion. This, we assert, was, to begin with, a 
false statement. By whom was he chosen? At what 
convention? Did the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, 



116 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

the Baptists, the Methodists, the Catholics — no incon- 
siderable portion of the American population of Cin- 
cinnati — choose him? What vouchers, what creden- 
tials but his own unreliable word did he exhibit? 
What delegates then on hand to indorse his statement? 
"Silentium" 

2d. He spat upon the corner-stone, and insulted all the 
denominations I have named by saying, "brutally," to 
use one of his own expressions, " That the Church, 
whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, holds free 
thought and free investigation as heretical as ever; 
that she is forsaken of all thinkers; she is the object 
of mockery and contempt, and has become a prey to 
the rats and mice of history." This, it must be ac- 
knowledged, is modest and consistent on the part of 
the chosen representative of the American population of 
Cincinnati, and quite complimentary to the chosen of 
all denominations. 

3d. His ignorance. In his sermon in Hopkins' Hall, 
reported in the city papers, of October 14th, he says : 
" The new dogma of the Immaculate Conception makes 
Jesus the cause of his own grandmother's having 
brought his mother into the world without due process 
of nature." I ask the reader not to overlook his at- 
tempt to escape from the humiliation to which this 
betrayal of his inexcusable ignorance justly subjected 
the pastor of Hopkins' Hall First Congregational So- 
ciety. 

4th. He illustrated his appreciation of every man's 
right to " free thought " by launching the anathema of 
despotism, or nicknaming and reviling as despots all who 
voted at the last elections, that is to say, hundreds of 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 117 

thousands, contrary to his dictation. This audacity- 
shows that it is only owing to the circumstances of a 
change of time and place that Mr. Vickers is not a 
Torquemada. 

5th. The gentleman denies that free thought was 
ever tolerated in the Catholic Church. And when 
I asked him when and where there appeared on this 
earth better or deeper thinkers or writers than the 
fathers of the early ages— Tertullian, Cyprian, Augus- 
tine, Lactantius, etc.; or their successors, Aquinas, 
Venerable Bede, and hundreds of others, whom it were 
tedious to mention, in the long lapse of ages w T hich he 
calls dark — he quarrels w T ith Emerson, of his own 
school of irreligion, and, of course, w T ith the Protest- 
ant Carlyle for eulogizing the activity of the human 
mind and the light and the science, and the materials 
of mental advancement and knowledge accumulated at 
that period, saying that " Emerson did not know what 
he was talking about." But when the glorious works 
of the fathers and doctors of the Church rise up as 
monuments to vindicate the fact that they thought 
freely, investigated thoroughly, spoke and wrote fear- 
lessly, he eludes the force of this argument by saying 
that they advocated punishment of heresy. To this 
objection we made many answers : first, it does not dis- 
prove the fact of their having thought freely if they 
thought wrong; secondly, they had the teaching and 
example of the God of the Old Testament, whom Mr. 
Vickers probably has not yet disow r ned, for their oppo- 
sition to false religion ; thirdly, they had learned from the 
New Testament that heresy was classed by the inspired 
writers with the most grievous crimes; fourthly, they 



118 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

were aware of all that true believers had to suffer from 
Pagans, Circumcellions, Donatists, Arians, Albigenses, 
Moors; and, in later years, the Hussites, the Peasants, 
Ziska, and the "endless army of warriors for the light 
and truth of God," who, as Mr. Vickers acknowledges, 
"requited with bloody vengeance what their brothers 
had suffered." Fifthly, if the Church had to define 
what constituted heresy, that Christians may avoid it, 
it was the civil authorities, as guardians of public se- 
curity, that inflicted the penalties incurred by outrages 
on society. As proof of this we refer him to the able 
letters of the Count de Maistre, which we have no time 
to do more than name. Sixthly, the Protestant churches 
of England and Scotland on either side of the Atlantic, 
in later centuries and years, have sins enough to an- 
swer for on this charge. Finally, Mr. Vickers, and all 
who think with him, having had, like us, Catholic an- 
cestors, are bound as much as we are to apologize for 
their conduct, if apology it needs. We are no advo- 
cates of coercion. God and the Church allow men to 
think. Man, if he think not, is man no more. But 
God and the Church forbid man to think evil. Here 
is the distinction which Mr. Vickers has not the sa- 
gacity to see or the candor to acknowledge. God, in 
the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy, in the Deca- 
logue, and in the New Testament, forbids him to prefer 
his own judgment to that of the authority which he 
has commissioned to teach him, forbids him to covet, 
and if he do, he reserves the right to punish him. 
So the Church can not, any more than God, prevent 
man from thinking, but she warns him that the 
" Searcher of hearts " knows when he willfully thinks 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 119 

evil, as Cain did, and for this shall "sin be at the 
door." 

6th. I reiterate, there is no power, human or divine, 
that forces a man to believe a religion or any thing 
else against his own honest and enlightened convic- 
tions ; and, at the same time, I maintain, with the Pope, 
it is a damnable error to teach that paganism or idola- 
try is true; that Mormonism or Mohammedanism is 
true ; that Christ is a fiction, hell, a fiction, or the Bible 
a crutch, even when man's perverted reason leads him 
to such ridiculous and false conclusions. 

7th. I hold that it is an error to maintain that the 
Church ought to be separated from the State, and the 
State from the Church, for these should act in har- 
mony, like soul and body ; and God declares that kings 
should be the nursing fathers and queens the nurses of 
his Church or people. (Is. xlix: 23.) But, in truth, 
the Church needeth no such nursing. It succeeded 
during the first three centuries not only without the 
aid of kings, but in spite of their hostility ; it survived 
the ten bloody persecutions of the u Beast" of pagan- 
ism with its ten horns; it suffered cruelly from the 
Arian kings, from the Henrys, the Barbarossas ; it has 
suffered awfully in the suppression of its religious or- 
ders, the confiscation of its property, the incarceration 
and death of its ministers in Spain, in Portugal, in 
England, in Italy, in South American provinces, in 
Mexico, in France. It is even now suffering in every 
one of those countries, showing what the union of the 
Church and State — not as the State ought to be, but as 
it is — does for her. And when it pretended to act in 
concert with her, its friendship was often worse to her 



120 THE TICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

than its enmity; it made her responsible for its mis- 
deeds, it stifled her in its embrace. I, therefore, want 
no such union. I deprecate it. 

CHURCH AND STATE. 

No one, at the present day, is permitted, by free- 
thinkers, to hint that a union of Church and State is 
desirable. It is an exploded notion, one of the antique 
memories, baneful and distressing. All the liberals, the 
pioneers of sensational maxims in politics, the transcend- 
ental boobies from German universities, the conserva- 
tive Catholics, and the fools who run loose through 
society, all forbid the union between the State and the 
Church. The question is as near an unanimous nega- 
tive as it is probable any question will ever approach 
in the world. 

This is very consoling. Here is one point at least 
in the position of the Church against which the re- 
proaches of the enemy can not be directed. Here, as 
the saying is, she has a sure thing. She has been put 
out in the cold, as it is sometimes proposed to do with 
New England, and she has no friend inside. The State 
house door is locked and bolted, and she is told by the 
police to move on. 

This is all quite proper. Ecclesiastics, we are told, 
are poor politicians. They do not know how to man- 
age public affairs. They interfere with the cozy tran- 
quillity which statesmen desire to enjoy when they labor 
for the public good, and are at the same time so very 
unselfish, so practically disinterested. Moreover, the 
Church is excluded because the State loves her. It 
distresses the politicians when they think of the impro- 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 121 

priety of the person of the Church wearing the livery 
of the State. Her mission, they insist, is higher and 
holier. Her sacred vestments must not be soiled by the 
hands of demagogues. To guard her as much as possi- 
ble from a profanation so dreadful, she must be excluded 
from all participation in human affairs. Her proper 
place is Olympus where she is expected to doze and 
occasionally nod, but she must do this gently, so as not 
to shake the spheres. This is all quite correct and be- 
coming. If any wrong is committed, any tyranny 
practiced, the Church is relieved from any responsibil- 
ity, because she can not interfere to prevent it. She is 
confined to a position in space where the least possible 
communication with mankind is permitted. She is tol- 
erated, respected, often abused ; no more. 

And all this is quite proper, because the difference 
between the condition of the world now and at the time 
when she guided the course of events, is manifest proof 
of incapacity. She did not know how to govern, as the 
historians say, and do n't they know ? Has it not been 
hammered into the heads of men for more than three 
hundred years, and is it not, therefore, incontrovertible 
that the Church is incapable ? 

How eminently superior is the State! When the 
Church ruled, in the olden time, then there were no na- 
tional debts, now we have them in all their glory! 
When the Church ruled, taxes were scarcely known in 
the world, now let us be thankful and joyful, every man, 
from the millionaire to the pauper, knows all about 
them. Here is an invincible argument to exclude the 
Church and her ignorant ecclesiastics from political in- 
terference. Who can contemplate these facts and not 



122 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

acknowledge the wisdom of the change! When the 
Church ruled, there was no paper money; the foolish 
old thing insisted that gold and silver should be the 
basis of trade ; now survey the magnificent prospect ! A 
steam engine making money and thousands of millions 
circulated far and w T ide, and the people, like Oliver 
Twist, though with a greater capacity to swallow, ask- 
ing for more, more, more ! Here is a grand feat of 
statesmanship, which old Mother Church would have 
never thought of. When the Church ruled, her relig- 
ious houses were open to the poor: there was employ- 
ment for all who wanted it. It was no disgrace to be 
in poverty. Now, the poor are shut up in the alms- 
house, fed on the lowest and meanest diet, made to feel 
their degradation in their inmost heart, and, as in English 
work-houses, the husband separated from the wife and 
the children from both. What an immense advance is 
this on the miserable state of affairs which existed in 
the middle ages, the dark, yes, the exceedingly dark 
ages! There were no trades unions then, no strikes — 
those desperate but useless efforts of labor to escape the 
hand of the capitalist — which is another proof of the 
ignorance of those times and the unskillful legislation 
of the Church. All history can be produced to show 
the incapacity of ecclesiastics to rule the State. There 
were no great standing armies when she was in power ; 
now they consist of millions of men, taken from the in- 
dustry of the land, which groans to support them. The 
grandest country that ever invited men to her cities and 
fields is severed, and starvation exists where plenty 
should prevail, and the Church is deprived of all the 
honor which should result from such a state of things, 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 123 

because she had no hand in producing this ruin of a 
nation. The State knew better than the Church ; it was 
the State that did it, to her be all the honor ! 

From these few samples it will be inferred that the 
exclusion of the Church from the councils of the State 
throughout all the world works beautifully for the hap- 
piness of men. It was a noble thought — and we all ad- 
vocate it — which separated the tw T 6 powers, but it will 
not be considered, we hope, presumptuous if w r e hint 
that the world with all it conveniences, trade, manu- 
factures, and expositions, has no reason to scoff so often 
at the Church. The State has managed to reduce hu- 
man affairs in the old and new world to the worst pos- 
sible condition, and the Church is deprived of what 
should be her share in the honors by her exclusion from 
its councils. Let all the world, therefore, rejoice, that 
the State and the kingdom of God have no connec- 
tion. 

8th. I propose to circulate the whole Bible, the true 
Bible, the Holy Scriptures — to place a copy of these in 
every Catholic home. But not a mutilated Bible, not 
a Bible from which have been torn the books of Judith, 
Esther, Tobias, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, three 
chapters of Daniel, and the Maccabees — not a mistrans- 
lated, perverted, pestilent Bible, such as the Pope has 
never condemned in language too severe. 

And yet it is a singular inconsistency in Mr. Vickers 
to say a word about the Bible when he says with Lu- 
ther, the Epistle of St. James — which Protestants as well 
as Catholics retain — is an " epistle of straw ;" that an- 
other book of the sacred canon contains " bits of fun ;" 
and all of which, straw or no straw, fun or no fun, Mr. 



124 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Vickers calls a crutch, to be cast away in the name of 
that reason which Luther called a "harlot." Hence- 
forth we leave him in the hands of the orthodox min- 
isters of Cincinnati and the Young Men's Christian and 
Biblical Societies. Let them look to it. 

9th. The Jesuits. They need no defense of mine. 
They have filled the world with their scholarship, their 
science, their missionary labors, their saintly men — like 
St. Francis Xavier. Postulants, before they enter their 
houses, know that walking in his footsteps they can not 
go astray; that the order was and is approved by the 
Church ; that the doors and windows are open for them 
to leave it when they please ; and that during the long 
years they are required to remain novices or scholastics, 
they have to study the constitutions ; and finally vow 
obedience only when they have been taught and con- 
vinced that superiors can not oblige them to any thing 
contrary to the known will of God. 

10th. The gentleman, as well as certain newspapers, 
that is, The Nation, pretends to place me in opposition 
to the Encyclical and Syllabus, and threatens me with 
Pontifical displeasure. This is another instance of his 
lack of good faith. He knows that I said in my pastoral, 
of the judgment of His Holiness in the Encyclical and 
Syllabus, " We receive it implicitly, we bow to it rev- 
erently, we embrace it cordially, we hail it gratefully. 
To us it is as the voice of God on Sinai, on the Jordan, 
on Thabor." And we took, further, the superfluous 
pains to show that every error condemned in the Sylla- 
bus was, as the Pope declared it to be, "pernicious." 

11th. The hiatus in the letter of Mr. Vickers, Cin- 
cinnati Gazette, 22d November, written and published 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 125 

when I was attending to official duties in St. Mary's, 
Auglaize County; in Middletown, Dayton, Urbana, can 
be filled satisfactorily to every candid mind with an- 
swers contained in my letter, published in the Catholic 
Telegraph, of the 13th November, concerning Firmilian, 
Augustine, Aquinas. There is no necessity for follow- 
ing the gentleman in his endless repetitions. But that 
he may understand how far I am from reticence or con- 
cealment, I answer as categorically, as pertinently, as 
closely to the question as human language can answer, 
that Augustine, Aquinas, popes, and cardinals did teach 
that the secular power was bound to repress heresy ; for 
it was in their days, as well as since and before, con- 
nected w 7 ith disturbance of the public peace, with out- 
rages on society, with gross violation of decency and 
morals. Is this what he calls altissimum silentiumf or 
can he deny that I answered this question, illustrating 
it with the case of the Mormons, more than once be- 
fore? 

12th. I answer that I believe the saints canonized by 
the immortal and saintly Pio Nono, in 1867, deserve 
the honor, whatever brutal names Mr. Vickers may 
choose to call them. 

13th. Instead of having any thing to retract, I must 
add to what I have said of Giordano Bruno, on the 
faith of a most reliable historian, De Feller, in his Biog- 
raphie Universelle. He had, after his apostasy, in con- 
sequence of his quarrel with Calvin and Beza, to fly 
from Geneva, and Paris, and Wittenburg. In this last 
city he turned Lutheran; and finding even this Prot- 
estant city too hot for him, on account of his turbulent 
spirit and his open denial of all the most important re- 



126 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

vealed truths held by Jews and Christians, he traveled 
through different places in Germany. He went to Kome, 
of course, to circulate the books which, under the pa- 
tronage of the delectable Virgin Queen Elizabeth and 
Sir Philip Sidney, he had published in London, on the 
expulsion of the triumphant beast, and there met the fate 
he deserved. 

14th. And this caps the climax of Mr. Vickers' ig- 
norance, inconsistency, and lack of logic. He argues 
that if I claim for the Church the credit of Bacon's 
science and Luther's learning, I " must, pari ratione, for 
a like reason, also give her credit for Leahy's murder." 
Now, reasoning like this would make Christ as respon- 
sible for the treason and suicide of Judas, as he was 
deserving of the homage of men and angels for the 
teachings of the inspired Evangelists and the Apostles. 
Such is Mr. Vickers' ratiocination. 

15th. I have thus, on my side, and in my own better 
right, shown "what this controversy has settled," and I 
am perfectly satisfied with the result. I have received 
no "threatening letters," but oral and written felicita- 
tions from both Protestants and Catholics. By means 
of it, minds previously impervious to truth have had 
their eyes opened to the light. They have seen how 
the man who taunted me with opposition to the circu- 
lation of the Bible has himself learned from it that 
" Christ is a fiction " and the Bible " a crutch ; " that 
he stalks, every Sunday, with bald impiety, into Hop- 
kins' Hall, to teach these truths to a Cincinnati audi- 
ence; and that all the Catholics and Protestants of this 
city who search the Scriptures, and trust to Christ for 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 127 

salvation, indulge illusory expectations of happiness, fol- 
low false lights, and lean but on broken reeds. Now 
I have placed, disregarding personal insult, his startling 
impieties, in their native deformity, before the public, 
so that none may be deceived by him but those that 
choose to be deceived. And having thus marked him 
with the "fcenum in Cornu" I say, not only to Cath- 
olic, Protestant, and Christian, but also to Israelite, 
"Ilunc tu caveto" 

16th. Calvin not only burned Servetus, but wrote a 
book to justify the act and to prove that it was lawful 
so to punish heretics. Aretius, in his book De Supplicio, 
contends that Gentilis was justly put to death by the 
Calvinistic magistrates of Berne. And Beza undertakes 
to prove the same thesis, more at length, in his book 
De Hereticis a Magistratu Puniendis. These reformers 
thought, with Bellarmin and others, that if men were 
freethinkers, they had to keep their freethinking to 
themselves, and not disturb the peace of society by 
broaching new doctrines or false religions. 

17th. The word "persequar," in what used to be the 
bishop's oath, meant only to pursue with argument, in 
which sense the word is frequently used. But it is now 
twenty years since the Fathers of the Sixth Provincial 
Council of Baltimore objected to the use of the old for- 
mula, which admits of an odious sense, and the new 
formula is this: 

"Ego, N. electus Ecclesiae N. ab hac hora in antea 
obediens ero beato Petro Apostolo, sanctseque Romanse 
Ecclesise, et Beatissimo Patri N. Papse N. suisque suc- 
cessoribus canonice intrantibus. Papatum Romanum 



128 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

adjutor eis ero ad retinendum et defendendum, salvo 
meo or dine. Jura, honores, privilegia et auctoritatem 
sanctse Romanse Ecclesise, Papse, et successorum prse- 
dictoruni, conservare, defendere, promovere cllrabo. ,, 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



FINAL BEJOINDEE OF ME. VICKEBS. 129 



FINAL REJOINDER OF REV. THOMAS 
VICKERS. 

(Published in the Cincinnati Gazette^ December 31, 1867.) 

To the Editor of the Cincinnati Gazette : 

If there were any need of excuse for the postpone- 
ment of my reply to the last archiepiscopal eruption, 
which appeared in your columns on December 5th, it 
would, doubtless, be sufficient to say, that all my spare 
time has been consumed in preparing the whole contro- 
versy for publication in a more permanent form. I 
trust that, by this act, I shall make some slight atone- 
ment to the Archbishop for all the mental perturbation 
of which he has been the victim and I the unhappy 
cause. Now that he has, "on his side, and in his own 
better right (!), shown what this controversy has set- 
tled ;" now that he has publicly, solemnly, and with 
marked emphasis, declared that he is " perfectly satis- 
fied with the result ;" now that he boasts of having re- 
ceived " oral and written felicitations from both Protest- 
ants and Catholics," in view of this result; now that he 
is happy in the conviction that, by means of this con- 
troversy, " minds previously impervious to truth have 
had their eyes opened to the light;" now that he tri- 
umphs in the proud consciousness of having placed my 
"startling impieties (!) in their native deformity be- 
9 



130 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

fore the public/' it will certainly be a source of peculiar 
satisfaction and delight to him to learn that I have 
taken such pains to carry the controversy beyond the 
limits of mere ephemeral and local interest, to spread 
abroad the fame of his splendid moral and intellectual 
heroism, and thus, so far as in me lies, to erect to him 
monumentum cere perennius — a monument more endur- 
ing than even his brass! At any rate, whatever else 
may be his feeling, he will certainly perceive that I 
honor and apply the rule, " audiatur et altera pars." 

THE ARCHBISHOP FOLLOWS AN EXAMPLE. 

With these preliminary remarks, we will now pro- 
ceed to notice the salient points of the above-named 
production. The equanimity of the Archbishop evi- 
dently received a somewhat severe shock when he read 
my opinion as to what the controversy had settled, for 
he immediately begins to rave about " Punchinello " 
(I suppose he means Pulcinella), " self-glorification," 
etc., and says that I "forgot all the ignorance, incon- 
sistency, and false statements I had made in my en- 
counter with him," and says, also, in the same breath, 
"I shall follow his example! /" Probably all who read 
this controversy will agree that, whatever example the 
Archbishop may have followed in these several direc- 
tions, he has show T n himself an apt scholar. I shall 
not, however, bandy words with him on these points. 
Those who are qualified to judge will soon be able to 
form a well-considered judgment for themselves, without 
his or my further assistance. In glancing over this whole 
controversy, which I have before me as I write, I find 
that I have but one statement to retract. One formal 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 131 

misstatement I did make, and I here formally retract it, 
viz. : that the Catholic Telegraph bore the name of Arch- 
bishop Purcell as its principal editor. I say formal mis- 
statement, because the Archbishop has not only never 
denied that he controls its columns, but he has shown 
very conclusively that he does. With this single ex- 
ception, I have made no statements but such as I have 
abundantly substantiated. 

AN ARCHIEPISCOPAL MARE'S NEST. 

At the laying of the corner-stone of St. John's, I said 
I had been "chosen to express the sympathy of the 
American population of our city with the occasion." 
A little more attention to the ordinary rules of grammar, 
which I have already several times recommended, would 
have taught the Archbishop the propriety of reserving 
such expectorations as are contained in the first and sec- 
ond paragraphs of his last reply for a more private oc- 
casion. Did I say that I had been chosen by the Amer- 
ican population of our city, either in convention or out 
of it ? Did I not say expressly in my sermon of October 
13th, that I had been chosen by the St. John's Society ? 
What a prodigious waste of rhetoric about Episcopalians, 
Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics, whose 
" credentials " I neither asked nor needed ! 

"endless repetitions.'' 

In the Archbishop's eleventh paragraph, w 7 here it is 
exceedingly inconvenient for him to follow me, he says 
" there is no necessity of following the gentleman in his 
endless repetitions ;" but he is never weary of repeating 
such puerilities as are contained in the third and fourth 



132 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

paragraphs, concerning the Immaculate Conception and 
the "freemen of Ohio." Of course, every one knows 
that his last article was written mainly for home con- 
gumption; that is, for the special benefit of his " beloved 
Catholic flock;" but one would think that even they 
would, by this time, see through the hollowness of such 
petty artifices. I neither misrepresented the new dogma, 
nor was I ignorant of its proper content and import. 
How could I be, with the Papal bull — " Ineffabilis " — 
before me? Nor did I "dictate" to any man how he 
should vote at the last election, for I said nothing about 
it until it was all over. 

FREE THINKING AND EVIL THINKING. 

I have no heart to discuss at length the utterly dis- 
honest and mendacious character of the sixth and sev- 
enth paragraphs ; it will be apparent to every one who 
has read the discussion with attention. I will simply 
call attention to one or two points, concerning which 
the Archbishop has made some really startling announce- 
ments. In the first place, we are indebted to him for 
a definition of " free thought." He says, with unwearying 
(although somewhat wearisome) repetition, that " thought 
is essentially free ;" "God made it free, and no power can 
chain it;" "neither God nor the Church can enslave 
it;" "man, if he think not, is man no more," etc. I 
suppose all this ecclesiastical rhetoric, translated into 
plain, historical, matter-of-fact language, means simply 
that Huss and Bruno enjoyed, while the flames were 
crackling around them, the inestimable and inalienable 
privilege of unlimited freedom of thought! Certainly, 
this astounding discovery of the Archbishop's must have 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 133 

cost him many sleepless nights and great expenditure of 
"midnight oil!" 

But, on the other hand, although " men could think 
and speak as they pleased/' "when they thought and 
spoke what was wrong, the Church had a right to tell 
them so" — "God and the Church forbid man to think 
evil." To "think evil" means here, in plain and un- 
equivocal language, to think contrary to the will of the 
Catholic Church, which claims to be the infallible expo- 
nent of the will of God. How variable the will of this 
" immutable " church is may be seen from an admission 
made by the Dublin Heview, a magazine so ultramontane 
in its Catholicism that it openly proclaims the infallibility 
of the Pope. In an article on the Encyclical and Syl- 
labus, in the April number, 1865, may be found the fol- 
lowing words: "How was the doctrine of Our Lady's 
Immaculate Conception circumstanced during that event- 
ful December of 1854 ? On the 7th of that month, no 
Catholic was permitted to stigmatize its denial as unsound; 
on the 8th, all Catholics were required to regard such 
denial as heretical" Therefore we see that the standard 
of right thinking is liable to constant change; that, in 
fact, what is right thinking and what wrong thinking, 
what is good thinking and what evil thinking, depends 
wholly upon the whim of this mutable "immutable" 
Church. On the 7th of December, 1854, one could 
declare the Virgin Mary not to have been immaculately 
conceived without even incurring reproof; on the day 
following, whoever made such a declaration was "in 
danger of hell fire" — a heretic and reprobate. The 
right "to tell men so," when they "think evil," is a 
euphemism which the Archbishop himself has explained 



134 THE VICKRES AND PUECELL CONTROVERSY. 

to mean the right to burn men alive — a right which, as 
he expressly says, was not only properly exercised against 
Bruno by Pope Clement VIII, in the year 1600, but might 
also be properly exercised against Garibaldi by Pius IX, 
in the year 1867; and yet the Archbishop has the ef- 
frontery to say, again and again, that he is "no advocate 
of coercion." 

Archbishop Purcell's theory of free thought may be 
summed up in these words : No one — not God and not 
the Church — could prevent a man from thinking and 
asserting the dogma of the Immaculate Conception to 
be, like a good many other dogmas of the Romish 
Church, an absurdity, or, in the classic language of 
Gregory XVI, "insane nonsense;" but, if he did think 
and say so, the "holy" Church might burn him for it 
without any detriment to his freedom of thought! Of 
course, the Archbishop would be very careful not to un- 
dertake the burning process in Cincinnati (even in Gar- 
ibaldi's case). The punishment here, and at present, 
would be an impotent anathema, hurled from the Cathe- 
dral, on the corner of Plum and Eighth, coupled, per- 
haps, with a foaming denunciation in the Catholic Tel- 
egraph. 

CATHOLIC ANCESTORS. 

Another remarkable point which the Archbishop 
repeatedly makes is the following : " Mr. Vickers, and 
all who think with him, having had, like us, Catholic 
ancestors, are bound as much as we are to apologize 
for their conduct, if apology it needs." I most respect- 
fully decline the honor. Dirty Peter Reverendus ac 
Eruditissimus Dens, and the still dirtier Holy Father, 
Alexander VI, were no ancestors of mine, and I by no 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 135 

means feel called upon to apologize for them. On the 
contrary, I hate and detest all such, ancestors or no an- 
cestors. 

And, furthermore, when, in the sixteenth paragraph 
of his reply, Archbishop Purcell attempts to nullify the 
effect of my quotations from Bellarmin, Dens, Gregory 
XVI, and Cardinal Pacca, by showing that Calvin, 
Aretius, and Beza also asserted that it was lawful to 
punish heretics, I w T ish to remind him of two things: 
first, I have never undertaken to defend the Protestant 
Church against the charge of persecution for opinion's 
sake, as he has done in the case of the Catholic Church ; 
secondly, Calvin, Aretius, and Beza did not, like Gregory 
XVI and Cardinal Pacca, live in the nineteenth century, 
nor were their treatises on the punishment of heresy 
adopted, within the present century, by any body of 
Protestant ministers as "the best w T orks and the safest 
guides in theology," as was the " Theologia" of Dens by 
the Catholic clergy of Dublin, in the year 1808. In 
general, I may remark, concerning all the Archbishop's 
tirades against the persecuting spirit of Protestantism, 
that they would sound better and have more weight if 
they came from another source. 

Loripedem rectus derideat, JEthiopem albus. 
Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione quaerentes f 
Quis coelum terris non misceat, et mare coelo f 
Si fur displiceat Verri, homicida Miloni? 
Clodius accuset moechos, Catilina Cethegum f 

THE TRUE RELIGION. 

In the sixth paragraph there is a somewhat remarkable 
instance of that " reticence," which the Archbishop says 



136 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

is so foreign to him. He says : " I maintain, with the 
Pope, it is a damnable error to teach that Paganism or 
idolatry is true, that Mormonism or Mohammedanism is 
true," etc. Is it not also a damnable error to teach 
that Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Methodism — in 
fact, any other ism but Catholicism is true? Was the 
Archbishop thinking of the " oral and written felicita- 
tions " when he omitted these from his list ? 

CHURCH AND STATE. 

The readers of this controversy have already had so 
many brilliant archiepiscopal combinations of grammar, 
logic, and morals, that they will hardly be surprised at 
any thing new in this direction, however startling. Per- 
haps, however, they will be interested to see, in syllo- 
gistic form, the substance of what the Archbishop has 
said on the union of Church and State. Here it is : 

1. "It is an error to maintain that the Church ought 
to be separated from the State, and the State from the 
Church." 

Archbishop Purcell says : " I do not want a union of 
Church and State — I deprecate such a union." 

Therefore, Archbishop Purcell, according to his own 
showing, maintains an error. 

2. " It is an error to maintain that the Church ought 
to be separated from the State, and the State from the 
Church ; " that is, Church and State ought to be united. 

Archbishop Purcell says : " I do not want a union of 
Church and State — I deprecate such a union." 

Therefore, Archbishop Purcell, according to his own 
showing, does not want, deprecates, what ought to be. 

Now, either the Archbishop is satisfied with these con- 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 137 

elusions, or the bald declaration (published in the Tele- 
graph, of October 16), that he did not want a union of 
Church and State, but deprecated such a union, was a 
subterfuge, intended to convey a wrong impression, and 
thus to deceive his readers. 

THE BIBLE. 

The ravings of Archbishop Purcell, in his last and 
previous replies, concerning my views of the Bible, are 
utterly unworthy of notice ; either from intentional wick- 
edness or from utter incapacity to understand them, he 
so distorts and disfigures them, that no sane man would 
recognize them again. I will, however, here say, for his 
special information, that should he desire to preach from 
my pulpit some Sunday, he w r ill find on the desk " the 
whole Bible," and not the "emasculated (!), mutilated" 
Scriptures, about which he makes such a pother, and 
he will be at liberty to interpret or misinterpret it as he 
chooses, provided that he does not compel those who 
listen to him to accept his exegesis. Furthermore, when 
the Archbishop proceeds to place, and really places, " a 
copy of the whole Bible in every Catholic home," and 
does not merely boast of what he " proposed " or "pro- 
poses" to do, there will be no more occasion for com- 
plaints, such as I have personally heard, during the 
progress of this discussion, from members of his "beloved 
Catholic flock" — that they are not allowed to read the 
Bible. Let the Archbishop look to it — he is abund- 
antly able — and not wait for some Protestant Bible So- 
ciety to do it for him. 



138 THE VICKRES AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 
THE JESUITS ONCE MORE. 

I have already had such frequent occasion to point 
out the equivocations and subterfuges of the Archbishop, 
that the work has become disgusting to me. Still, there 
are a few more cases to be noticed, and one of these con- 
cerns the Jesuits. At one time he asserts that the Jes- 
uits "take no unconditional vows;" that " the doors and 
windows are open, and they may leave" whenever they 
please ; now he finds it convenient to let us infer (what 
we already knew) that it is only the "postulants," or 
novices and scholastics, who are allowed to leave ; but 
when, after studying the constitutions, where they learn 
that they are to have no will of their own, but to be- 
come as a stick (bacillus), a corpse (cadaver), in the 
hands of the Superior ; when, after this, they take the 
solemn vow of obedience, there is no escape, except as 
the criminal escapes from the penitentiary. And what 
does the Archbishop say when I ask him, before praising 
too highly the morality of the Jesuits, to look into three 
Jesuit manuals of morals which I name to him? He 
says he will not follow me, where I seem so anxious to 
lead, "into the discussion of immoralities so falsely at- 
tributed to the writings of Catholic societies or theolo- 
gians ! " Now the three works I named, and from which 
I quoted the beginnings of three sentences in the original 
Latin, not daring to translate their disgusting obscenity, 
were not only all written by men eminent in the Society 
of Jesus, but were all issued ivith the express approbation 
of the "holy" Church, and were all intended for the use 
of young students as guides to the duties of the future pas- 
toral office, and particularly to the duties of the confes- 
sional! 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 139 



THE ARCHBISHOP AND THE ENCYCLICAL. 

It is very evident that the Archbishop is in some trep- 
idation as to his position toward the Encyclical and 
Syllabus. The contradiction is so glaring that all his 
attempts to gloss it over only make the matter worse, 
as I have shown in regard to the union of Church and 
State. He took very good care to make no reply to the 
letter of Mr. Paul Mohr, in w T hich his relation to the 
"Apostolic See" was discussed with such merciless 
perspicuity. Of course, as I have already said, I can 
only congratulate Archbishop Purcell if he honestly 
differs from documents so utterly subversive of the wel- 
fare of the individual and of society, as I take the En- 
cyclical and Syllabus to be, but I abhor and detest the 
foul hypocrisy which, bitterly hating the whole founda- 
tion on which modern society and modern science rest, 
seeks, by cunning temporization, and artful tergiversa- 
tion, to gain a firm foothold there where an open and 
straightforward course would subject it to universal 
scorn and contempt. 

"the hiatus." 

When Archbishop Purcell said that "the hiatus" in 
my letter of November 22, could be filled " satisfactorily 
to every candid mind," with answers contained in his 
letter of November 13, he probably did it in the hope 
that the public had already forgotten what he did say; 
at any rate, he himself either no longer had any dis- 
tinct remembrance of the contents of said letter, or he 
uttered a deliberate falsehood. I refer " candid minds " 
to the letters in question. And even now, when the 



140 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Archbishop pretends to answer " as categorically, as 
pertinently, as closely to the question as human lan- 
guage can answer," in order "that I may understand 
how far he is from retioence or concealment," does he 
answer the questions I asked him? Not one of them! 
But he forges a question I never did ask him ; gives an 
answer to the same which is full of historical perversion, 
and thus his readers are led astray again. 

"saint" peter de arbues. 

Although I asked an entirely different question, which 
the Archbishop did not see fit to answer — namely, 
whether he personally had any thing to do with the can- 
onization of a certain bloody inquisitor — he now volun- 
teers the information that he " believes the saints canon- 
ized by the immortal and saintly Pio Nono, in 1867, 
deserve the honor!" Now, I have the decree of canon- 
ization before me, and the name of Don Pedro Arbues 
de Epila is the second on the list of new saints. Per- 
haps the character of this very man, coupled with the 
indorsement which he receives at the hands of Arch- 
bishop Purcell, will give us some clue to the quality of 
the Archbishop's own moral judgment. 

It is well known that the pretext on which the In- 
quisition in Spain began its diabolical work was, that 
among many of the Spanish Jews who, in the year 1391, 
had been compelled by the Church to abandon their an- 
cestral faith, there was still a secret attachment to the 
religion of their fathers. This was, of course, horrible 
and not to be endured. After having been introduced 
into the other Spanish provinces, the Inquisition was, 
finally, in the year 1180, introduced into the province 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 141 

of Arragon, and here it was that Arbues distinguished 
himself as one of the most pitiless of the inquisitors. 
Moreover, the Inquisition appeared at that time in its 
most hateful and immoral form, namely, as a financial 
resource, for the royal exchequer was to be enriched by 
the fortunes of all who were declared guilty. Neither 
the names of the accusers, nor the accusations them- 
selves, were communicated to the accused; confessions 
were pressed out of them by the most excruciating tor- 
tures, and thousands were burned alive. The persecu- 
tion extended even to the posterity of the condemned;, 
that is to say, persons who had long been dead were 
condemned for heresy, and their children were, in con- 
sequence, deprived of their property and declared infa- 
mous. The people were driven to desperation ; an at- 
tack was made on Arbues, the chief sinner, w T ho received 
a deadly wound and died shortly afterward. The au- 
thority for these facts is not an enemy of the Church, 
but the Grand Inquisitor Paramo, whose work : De origine 
et progressu officii sanctae inquisitionis (Madrid, 1598), was 
the first history of the Inquisition based upon the archives. 
Now, Archbishop Purcell is continually declaiming 
against me because I rake the " kennels of history," as 
he calls it, to prove that the Catholic Church not only 
does not tolerate freedom of thought, but persecutes it 
wherever she finds it, according to the nature and ex- 
tent of her control over the secular power. He first 
gives us to understand that persecution is wholly for- 
eign to the Church, and then says that, even if she ever 
did persecute, Protestants are just as much bound to 
apologize for it as he; that, in other words, we are 
equally answerable for the crimes of a common ances- 



142 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

try. Does Archbishop Purcell, in this individual in- 
stance, mean to say that Protestants (and perhaps Jews, 
also) ought to rejoice in the canonization of Don Pedro 
Arbues, and say that he " deserves the honor ? " Is this 
the archiepiscopal form of "apology" for the want of 
enlightenment in former ages? 

I am afraid simple-minded people will be inclined to 
lay aside all euphemisms, and say that when, "after 
mature deliberation" (matura deliberatione prcehabita), 
after having "often implored the divine assistance" 
(Divina ope saepius implorata), and " with the advice of 
the Venerable Brethren of the Holy Roman Church, 
Cardinals, Patriarchs, Archbishops, and Bishops assem- 
bled in Rome " (de Venerabilimn Fratrum Nostrum 
Sanetce Romance* Ecclesioz Cardinalium, Patriarchorum, 
Archiepiscoporum et Episcoporum in TJrbe existentium 
consilio), Pius IX, who claims to represent the Uni- 
versal Catholic Church, proclaims the bloody villain 
Arbues to be a saint, this is a more authoritative and 
more significant manifestation of the real animus of 
that Church than any utterance in favor of the lib- 
erty of conscience made by a mere subordinate prelate, 
even if such utterance were meant in good faith ; but 
when Archbishop Purcell, after all his vaunting decla- 
mation, comes forward and boldly asserts that Arbues 
is worthy of saintship, they will say he simply eats his 
own words, and again admits (as already in the case of 
Bruno and Garibaldi) that every thing he has said in 
opposition to my original thesis is false. 

bruno alias BRUNI. 
The last word of the Archbishop concerning Bruno 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 143 

confirms a suspicion which his first utterance in regard 
to him awakened in my mind. It is now perfectly evi- 
dent that, when Bruno's name was first introduced into 
the controversy, the Archbishop rushed to the first best 
encyclopaedia for information. This is the explanation 
of the childish and ridiculous stories about Bruno's 
quarreling with Calvin and Beza, and being obliged to 
fly from Geneva, his turning Lutheran, and his banish- 
ment from Wittenburg, etc. This is also the reason why 
De Feller must be elevated, by archiepiscopal authority, 
to the rank of an historian, and, indeed, of a "most reli- 
able" one; doubtless the Biographie Universelle will hence- 
forth be regarded in the " archdiocese " of Cincinnati, 
if nowhere else, as final authority in matters of history. 
This is also the explanation of that new specimen of the 
Archbishop's erudition, that Bruno's "Italian name" 
was Bruni. Concerning this latter point, I would simply 
say in passing, that if the Archbishop is desirous of con- 
sulting the only existing Italian edition of Bruno's works, 
he will find the same in my library, and the title is as 
follows: " Opere Giordano Bruno" 

AN ARCHIEPISCOPAL ANTI-CLIMAX. 

In the fourteenth paragraph the Archbishop is again 
jubilant over something which he considers " caps the 
climax of Mr. Vickers' ignorance, inconsistency, and 
lack of logic," and is so blind as not to see that the 
passage he cites from my reply of November 22 was 
intended as a persiflage of his ratiocination. I trust the 
Archbishop, who took the liberty of playing upon my 
name, will not take it amiss if I designate the same as 
the argumentum ad porcellum, and ask him to make a 



144 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

note of it for future use. The plain grammatical and 
logical import of what I said was this : that it would 
be, historically and psychologically, just as allowable 
to vindicate to the Catholic Church all the credit for 
Leahy's murder as to vindicate to her all the credit 
for Bacon's science and Luther's learning. To mention 
but a single fact : Who made it possible for Luther to 
translate the books of the Old Testament into his moth- 
er tongue ? Did the Catholic Church ? History tells us 
that the "holy" Church, instead of teaching her monks 
Hebrew, was, at that very time, inveighing against Reuch- 
lin, as in league with the devil, because he sought to re- 
vive the study of the Hebrew language and literature. 
Luther learnt his Hebrew mainly from a Jew! Does 
the Archbishop now comprehend the import of what I 
said? If he does not, I will give him the benefit of a 
still further example, and tell him that any reasoning 
which, in accordance with the laws of history and psy- 
chology, would make "Christ" "deserving of homage of 
men and angels for the teachings of the inspired Evan- 
gelists and Apostles," would also "make him responsi- 
ble for the treason and suicide of Judas," providing the 
terms " deserving of homage " and " responsible " are 
taken to be equivalents. While again recommending 
to him the study of some elementary treatise on gram- 
mar and logic, let me also suggest the propriety of his 
taking some lessons in style from Horace or somebody 
else, before he again speaks of "marking" a person 
" with the foenwn in cornu." However, I can not but 
thank him for the compliment he pays me in the quo- 
tation of these words, blundering and unintentional 
though it is, and meant to be exactly the reverse: "i^te- 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 145 

num habet in eornu; longefuge" — that is to say, "I have 
found him to be a dangerous opponent; it is better to 
keep a long way out of his reach." "Hunc tu, Romane, 
eaveto!" is the genuine text of Horace, which the Arch- 
bishop took care to "emasculate." 

THE BISHOP'S OATH. 

The concluding paragraph of the Archbishop's reply 
contains two specimens of polemical unfairness (to use 
an expression altogether too mild to suit the case) which 
completely eclipse all his previous prevarications. In 
the first place, he asserts, with startling audacity, that 
the verb persequi, "in what used to be the Bishop's oath, 
meant only to pursue with argument, in which sense the 
word is frequently used." I am sorry to be obliged again 
to propose an unpleasant alternative to the Archbishop : 
either he uttered an unconscious untruth, or he did not 
know w T hat he was talking about. Every man, who knows 
any thing at all about the Latin language, knows that 
the verb persequi, unmodified, as it occurs in the for- 
mula which I cited, never means, and never can mean, 
to " pursue with argument," and I defy the Archbishop 
to produce any Latin author by whom it is so used. 

"But," secondly, the Archbishop says, "it is now 
twenty years since the Fathers of the Sixth Provincial 
Council of Baltimore objected to the use of the old for- 
mula, which admits of an odious sense" So, it does really 
"admit of" an odious sense? And the "Fathers of the 
Sixth Provincial Council " objected to it? And so it seems, 
after all, according to the Archbishop's own showing, that 
down to the year 1846, every bishop (even in this coun- 
try) swore on his bended knees, and with his hands rest- 
10 



146 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

ing on the Gospel (which teaches us to love our enemies, 
and to do good to them that hate us), swore a solemn oath 
to persecute and assail all heretics to the extent of his power ! 
In the first place, the word has no such odious meaning ; 
and, in the second place, we objected to it because it has! 
O, immaculate logician ! 

But, still further, what did the Archbishop mean by 
the phrases, " What used to be the Bishop's oath," and 
" new formula " ? There must be something wrong in 
his chronology, as well as in the various other depart- 
ments I have mentioned. His so-called " new formula " 
appears in the proceedings of the Sixth Provincial Coun- 
cil of Baltimore, held in 1846, and my old formula, "what 
used to be the Bishop's oath," appears in the Pontificalia 
Romana, issued by the Church itself, and printed in Mech- 
lin in 1855 ! So the old formula is actually newer, by 
nine years, than the "new" one ! Or, does the one, holy, 
immutable Catholic Church require one thing on the con- 
tinent of Europe, and another and different thing in the 
United States? 

We are not left without explanation. And this time 
I have no alternative to offer. This time the Arch- 
bishop is manifestly and palpably dishonest. He says 
the Sixth Baltimore Council objected to the "old for- 
mula," and then pretends to give the oath now required, 
introducing it with the words, "And the new formula is 
this" Now, inasmuch as I find the name of " Joannes 
Baptist a, Episcopus Cincinnatensis," among those who 
subscribed to the decrees of the Council in question, 
and as the so-called " new " formula is the one now used 
in this country in the consecration of bishops, he must 
know precisely what that formula is ; and yet what does 



FINAL REJOINDER OF MR. VICKERS. 



147 



he do? He says, "Here is the new formula/' and inten- 
tionally conceals more than three-fourths of it ! He con- 
ceals, especially, the passage which proves conclusively 
that there is no essential difference between the "new" 
and the " old." I shall take the liberty of communicat- 
ing the whole, with a translation. What is omitted by 
the Archbishop is included in brackets, and the passage 
in small capitals is the one just alluded to. It is found 
in the reports of the Baltimore Councils, entitled, Con- 
cilia Provincialia, Baltimori habita ah anno 1829 usque ad 
annum 1849 (2d. ed., Bait., 1851, pp. 258, 259), and is as 
follows : 



Ego, N., electus Ecclesiaz N., 
ab hac hora in antea obediens ero 
beato Petro Apostolo, sanctceque 
Romance Ecclesice, et Beatissimo 
Patri N., Papce N., suisque suc- 
cessoribus canonice intrantibus. 
Papatum Pomanum adjutor eis 
ero ad retinendum et defendeu- 
sum, salvo meo online. Jura, 
honores, privilegia et auctoritatem 
sanctce Romance Ecclesice, Papce, 
et successorum prcedictorum, con- 
servare, defendere, promovere cu- 
rabo. [Regulas sanctorum 
Patrum, decreta, ordina- 
tiones, seu dispositiones et 
mandata apostolica, totis 
viribus observabo, et fa- 
ciam ab alus observari. 
Vocatus ad synodum, veniam, 
nisi prcepeditus fuero canonica 
prcepeditione. Apostolorum limina 
singulis decenniis personaliter per 
me ipsum visitabo; et Beatissimo 
Patri Nostro, N., ac successoribus 
prcefatis rationem de toto meo pas- 
tor ali officio, ac de rebus omnibus 
ad mem Ecclesice. statum, ad cleri 
et populi disciplinary, animarum 



I, N., bishop-elect of the 
Church of N., will, from this 
time forward, be obedient to 
the blessed Apostle Peter, and 
to the Holy Roman Church, 
and to the Most Holy Father 
N., Pope N., and to his suc- 
cessors, canonically instituted. 
I will assist them in upholding 
and defending the Roman Pa- 
pacy, saving my own order. I 
will take care to preserve, de- 
fend, and promote the rights, 
honors, privileges, and author- 
ity of the Holy Roman Church, 
of the Pope, and his aforesaid 
successors. [The rules op 
the holy Fathers, the de- 
crees, ORDINANCES OR DIS- 
POSALS, and Apostolic man- 
dates, I WILL OBSERVE WITH 
MY WHOLE STRENGTH, AND 
CAUSE THEM TO BE OBSERVED 

by others. Called to the 
synod, I will come, unless pre- 
vented by a canonical hinder- 
ance. The threshold of the 
apostles I will visit, in my 
own person, every ten years, 



148 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



denique, quae mece fidei traditce 
sunt, salutem quovis modo perti- 
nent ibus; et vicissim mandata 
Apostolica humiliter recipiam, et 
quam diligentissime exequar. 
Quod si legitimo impedimento 
detentus fuero, preefata omnia 
adimplebo per cerium Nuntium 
ad hoc speciale mandatum ha- 
bentem, dioecesanum sacerdotem, 
vet per aliquem alium presby- 
terum sazcularem, vel regularem, 
spectator probitatis et religionis, 
de supradictis omnibus plene in- 
structum. 



Possessiones vero ad mensam 
meam pertinentes non vendam, 
nee donabo; neque impignorabo, 
nee de now infeudabo, vel aliquo 
modo alienaboj etiam cum Con- 
sensu Capituli Ecclesice mece, in- 
consulto Romano Pontifice. Et 
si ad aliquam alienationem de- 
venero, pcenas in quadam super 
hoc edita constitutione contenlas, 
eo ipso incurrere volo. 



Consecrator in gremio suo lib- 
rum Evangeliorum ambabus mani- 
bus apertum tenens, inferiore parte 
libri Electo versa, ab eo prcesta- 
tionem hujusmodi juramenti red- 
pit, Electo adhuc coram eo genu- 
flexo dicente: 

Sic me Deus adjuvet, et hozc 
sancta Dei Evangelia. 



and to our Most Holy Father 
N., or aforesaid successors, I will 
render an account of my whole 
pastoral office, and of all things 
pertaining to the state of my 
Church, the discipline of the 
clergy and people, and, finally, 
of whatever pertains in any way 
to the salvation of the souls in- 
trusted to me ; and, on the other 
hand, I will humbly receive the 
Apostolic mandates, and most 
diligently execute them. But 
if I should be hindered by a 
legitimate impediment, I will 
fulfill every thing aforemen- 
tioned by a sure messenger, 
having a special mandate to 
this end — by a diocesan priest, 
or by some other secular or 
regular priest of known prob- 
ity and piety — fully instructed 
in the above-mentioned matters. 

The possessions which belong 
to my table I will not sell, nor 
give away, nor hypothecate, nor 
will I re-convey (enfeoff*) them, 
nor in any manner alienate 
them, even with the consent 
of the Chapter of my Church, 
without consulting the Roman 
Pontiff. And if I shall alien- 
ate any of them, I will will- 
ingly incur the punishment 
therefor, which is laid down 
in the published constitution. 

The Consecrator, holding with 
both hands the book of the. Gos- 
pels open in his lap, the bottom 
of the book turned toward the 
bishop-elect, receives from him 
the declaration of the oath in this 
form, the bishop-elect, hitherto 
kneeling before him, saying : 

So help me God^ and this, 
God's Holy Gospel. 



FINAL REJOINDER OP MR. VICKERS. 



149 



Et ipsum textum Evangeliorum 
ambabus manibus tangente, turn, 
non prius, dicit Consecrator / 



Deo gratias.'] 



And when the bishop-elect 
touches the text itself of the 
Gospels with both hands, then, 
and not before, the Consecrator 
says: 

Thanks be to God.] 



It is now perfectly plain to every body that the oath 
of consecration used in the United States binds every 
bishop to all the decrees and ordinances concerning the 
persecution of heretics which have ever been issued by 
the immutable Catholic Church, through popes or coun- 
cils, just as much as if they were all severally mentioned 
in the formula ; and that the omission, in this country, 
of the offensive words, does not change the matter a 
particle. 

And now I have done. So far as I can now see, noth- 
ing which the Most Reverend Archbishop Purcell can 
possibly say in reply will induce me to continue a con- 
troversy with a man whom I have shown to be wanting 
in all the qualities and acquirements necessary to entitle 
what he says to a moment's consideration. 

THOMAS VICKEES, 

Minister of the First Congregational Society. 



150 THE VICKEES AND PUECELL CONTEOVEBSY. 



ARCHISBHOP PURCELL TO REV. THOMAS 
VICKERS. 

(Published in the Catholic Telegraph, January 15, 1S68.) 

Rev. Mr. Vickers occupied two columns and a quar- 
ter of the Cincinnati Gazette, December 31st, with a final 
rejoinder to the undersigned. It w T ill take many a final 
rejoinder before the gentleman can convince any man of 
sense that he has answered the Archbishop. To use one 
of his favorite vulgarisms, his last " eruption " or "expec- 
toration," however foul the stomach, or deep the cesspool 
from which it rises, may be characteristic of the man, or 
savory to his sympathizers, but it is mere verbiage, with- 
out reason, truth, or argument. His tiresome repetitions 
must be an apology for mine, which I hope will not be 
found tiresome. His first expectoration is that our Lord 
and only Savior, Jesus Christ, was no more than a "the- 
ological fiction" — a myth, or mere creature at best, and 
not God — and that, consequently, the Jews who cruci- 
fied him for calling himself God were not guilty of dei- 
cide. They only illustrated free thought when they con- 
cluded in their own minds he was a blasphemer ; free 
speech, when they cried out "Away with him!" and/rae 
action, when they put him to an ignominious and a cruel 
death. 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 151 

Second expectoration. "The Bible is but a crutch." 
This sacred oracle of heaven, this authentic revelation 
of the Divine will, this dearest charter of human rights 
and aspirations, but a crutch, to be cast away in the 
name of that reason which, while it was man's only 
guide, filled the earth with idolatry, ignorance, and 
crime ! 

Third expectoration. "Jesus made his grandmother 
bring his own mother into the world without due pro- 
cess of nature." The squirming, the wriggling, the twist- 
ing and turning, with which he vainly essays to turn 
attention from the ignorance betrayed by this "erup- 
tion" is truly comical. 

Fourth expectoration. The anathema of despotism 
hurled at the heads of all who dared think for them- 
selves in the choice of candidates at the late election. 

Fifth expectoration. " That the Catholic Church for- 
bids the people to read the Bible." For this false and 
injurious statement he has never had the honesty to say 
peccavi, our proof to the contrary notwithstanding. 

Sixth expectoration. The Catholic Church forbids 
"free thought." To this we replied that neither God, 
who made thinking essential to mind, so that it is im- 
possible to conceive otherwise of the mind than as a 
thinking principle ; nor the Church, which neither could 
nor would change the essence of mind, forbids free thought. 
But free thought and voluntary bad thought, free speech 
and bad speech, free actions and bad ones, are different 
things; and that the Church can not, any more than 
God, allow men to think, to say, or to do evil, is clear 
from the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th verses of the seven- 
teenth chapter of Deuteronomy, where God commands 



152 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

all, under penalty of death, to give up their own, until 
then, free thought and j udgment, and abide by the sentence 
of the priest and judge. Mr. Vickers has not seen fit to 
tell us what he thinks of God Almighty for this. It is 
evidently an interdicting of bad thought by him who en- 
dowed man with free thought. And if God, without 
ceasing to be immutable and just, could so restrict his 
own gift as to render it not hurtful, but salutary, to 
man, I ask if the Church, which holds the place of 
God on earth, does wrong when, leaving man to think 
freely, she forbids him to think badly? To this rea- 
soning Mr. Vickers made no answer. Now, there are 
only two answers which he could have made: 

1st. That this was under the old dispensation — no 
longer binding on Christians. This we may peremp- 
torily deny. It was only the ritual portion of the Old 
Testament that was abrogated by the New, the Deca- 
logue and moral law remaining the same. 2d. He may 
answer that the Church does not hold the place of God 
on earth. This, also, we deny. The gentleman says 
he has the Bible — the complete, unmutilated, unemas- 
culated Bible — on the desk, if there be one, in Hop- 
kins' Hall. Has he, then, never read in it the ordi- 
nance of Christ, That he who will not hear the Church 
(but prefer to her thoughts his own) is to be reputed 
as "the heathen and the publican" (Matt, xviii: 27); 
that it is not against the individual, but against the 
Church, he promised the gates of hell would never pre- 
vail" (Matt, xvi: 18); that to the Church his own and 
his Holy Spirit's perpetual assistance was promised : 
"They who hear her, hear himself; they who despise 
her, despise him and the Father who sent him " (Luke 



ARCHBISHOP PTJRCELI/S REPLY. 153 

x: 16); that he made her the "pillar and ground of 
the truth" (1 Tim. iii: 15); that, when ascending into 
heaven, " he left to her the ministry of reconciliation " 
(2 Cor. v : 18) ; that to the Church he gave authority 
and commandment "to teach all nations until the con- 
summation of ages," imposing on them the obligation 
to believe her? And what is all this but proof from 
the New Testament that the Church does hold the place 
of God on earth — that she is the " one fold of the one 
Shepherd" (John x: 16); and that, as in the first days 
of Christianity, so now and forever he daily "adds to 
her such as shall be saved " (Acts ii : 47) ? Far from 
disparaging reason, the Church teaches that, though 
free as the ocean in her domain, she is not, any more 
than the ocean, illimitable. There is a barrier which, in 
her wildest excesses, she must respect, breaking her proud 
swelling waves on the shore where God has written the 
irrevocable words, "No farther" (Job xxxviii : 11). 

Seventh expectoration. The Archbishop's Pastoral on 
the Encyclical and the Syllabus is in contradiction with 
the teachings of the Church ; he will surely incur the 
displeasure of the Pope ; he is threatened with the " In- 
quisition." It is passing strange that this "mare's nest" 
should have been discovered only by Mr. Vickers. The 
Archbishop knows grammar, logic, ethics, theology a lit- 
tle too well to heed the warnings or to share the fears 
of the pope of Hopkins' Hall. 

Eighth expectoration. St. Cyprian denied the Pope's 
supremacy. I have quoted irrefragable proof to the 
contrary. 

Ninth expectoration: St. Augustine and Aquinas 
counselled the burning of heretics. I have quoted their 



154 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

own words to show, that while they agreed with God 
and the sacred writers of the Old and New Testament, 
that heresy was one of the deadly sins, they advocated 
lenity to the convicted. Nothing can be plainer or 
stronger than their language to this effect, but the wil- 
fully blind will not see when the sun shines. 

Tenth expectoration. The definition of the Immacu- 
late Conception on the 8th of December, 1854. On 
this subject the gentleman must allow me to say that 
he absolutely assumes the infallibility of his logic, and 
swells like the frog in the fable. "On the 7th of De- 
cember, 1854," he says, " one could declare the Virgin 
Mary not to have been immaculately conceived without 
even incurring reproof; on the day following, whoever 
made such a declaration was in danger of hell fire — a 
heretic, a reprobate." Yes, it was even so. The day 
before the definition of a dogma, it was not heresy to 
deny it; the day after its definition it was heresy. An 
opinion might have been more or less unsound, unten- 
able, unreasonable; but when the supreme court, the 
infallible tribunal which God had established to decide 
controversies that would otherwise have been intermi- 
nable, had once authoritatively spoken, it was no longer 
an opinion, but a doctrine of faith. It was thus that 
the precedent and justification of what was done in 
Rome, on the memorable 8th of December, 1854, were 
found in the first, the model Council of Jerusalem, when, 
on occasion of the discussion that agitated the Church 
at Antioch, "Paul and Barnabas determined, and some 
others of the other side, to go up to the apostles and 
ancients at Jerusalem about this question/' And when 
opinions and arguments had been heard and considered 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELl/s REPLY. 155 

by the apostles and ancients, and there was much dis- 
puting, which ceased when Peter and James had spoken, 
the decree was issued, commencing with the words : " It 
hath seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." (Acts 
xv : 28.) Before the rendition of this solemn decision, 
they who held a free opinion "incurred no reproof ;" 
after its rendition it was no longer a free opinion, and 
they who obstinately persisted in it, resisted at once the 
Holy Ghost and the Church. And this decision of the 
apostles and ancients was no " whim." And the Church 
that rendered it was not mutable, but steadfast and im- 
mutable in her adherence to truths, misunderstood, it 
might have been by some, but now by divine providence 
made clear and imperative to all. 

Need, then, intelligent Christians be informed that it 
was in this very manner that the canon of the Bible, 
the books of Scripture, were determined. It was the 
Church that decided the controversy, which had lasted 
three hundred years, with regard to the books entitled 
to be called canonical. She separated the wheat from 
the chaff, the true from the false, the genuine from the 
spurious, and when she had done this, she forfeited not 
her claim to be the immutable Church of an immutable 
Savior-God. Was it a "whim" on the part of Jeho- 
vah when, from non-creating, He became creating? 
when he revealed doctrines never revealed before, and 
proclaimed laws which then, for the first time, became 
obligatory ? 

Eleventh expectoration. Bruno and Garibaldi once 
more. Yet they both, in their way and to the utmost, 
made war, not on the religion alone, but on the lawful 
possessions, the peaceful subjects, and the life of the 



156 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Pope, and by those acts forfeited their lives to the 
laws. 

Twelfth expectoration. He says — and I quote his 
words, that all who read this controversy may know 
from his own foul pen who and what he is — "The 
ravings of Archbishop Purcell are utterly unworthy 
of notice, either from intentional wickedness, or from 
utter incapacity to understand them ; " his views of the 
Bible — and he proceeds to aver that he has "personally 
heard, during the progress of this discussion, from mem- 
hers of 'his beloved Catholic flock, 9 that they are not allowed 
to read the Bible" This I here pronounce a barefaced 
falsehood. And if Mr. Vickers does not give the names 
of the members of my " beloved flock" ivho have made this 
false statement, I now pronounce him the author of it. 
He says "It has become disgusting to me to point out 
the equivocations and subterfuges of the Archbishop." 
Let us see what equivocations and subterfuges will ex- 
tricate him from the foregoing. 

Thirteenth expectoration. He would rather have no 
ancestry than such as I have named — he acknowledges 
none like Peter Dens and others who advocate persecu- 
tion for opinions. Well he may repudiate all past ages 
except the nineteenth if he please, and claim to have 
been born without due process of nature. But who 
have been the persecutors, or the persecuted in the nine- 
teenth century ? By whom was civil and religious lib- 
erty first proclaimed in the colony of Maryland or the 
United States of America? By whom in the United 
States, and in the nineteenth century, have convents, 
churches, and private dwellings been burned, and gall- 
ing school-taxes imposed ? Not by Catholics. It is " dis- 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 157 

gusting" to me to allude to those persecutions of Cath- 
olics, but let the blame fall where it is deserved. I would 
not willingly rake up those kennels. 

Fourteenth expectoration. His spite against the Jes- 
uits. He tires not in his abuse of them, their manual, 
and their morals. I repeat, postulant, novice, scholastic, 
or professed, the chain of his own will is the only one 
that binds him to the society. He is as free to leave 
it as the members of any firm, corporation, church, or 
partnership is to leave his previous association ; and in 
this he " escapes not like a criminal from the peniten- 
tiary." The thought could hardly have entered into 
another mind than Rev. Thomas Vickers'. The Jesuit ! 
Why he will expectorate more cacochymy than w T ould 
fill the great tun of Heidelberg before he will render to 
astronomy, to the Pagans, the Indians, the negroes, to 
literature, to patriotism, to morality, the thousandth part 
of what has been done by De Vico, Secchi, Claver, Fran- 
cis Xavier, Marquette, Brebeuf, Father De Smet, Bishop 
Carroll, or the Jesuits of Cincinnati, New York, St. 
Louis, Georgetown, Spring Hill, or Baltimore. 

Fifteenth expectoration. Arbues, who was himself 
murdered ! Why does he not read the History of the 
Spanish Inquisition, by the Count de Maistre, as we have 
counseled him to do. He will then see that it had a 
royal, not an ecclesiastical, origin, and that the very 
life of the Spanish nation was imperiled by the Moors 
and Jews. Read Washington Irving and the fall of the 
Alhambra ; read the History of the Knights of Malta, 
of the Corsairs of Algiers, of the life-long struggle of 
Christianity with Mohammedanism, and you will see 
what European nations had to do, to dare, to suffer, in 



158 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

the conflict with Islamism, Judaism, and wild sectaries, 
and then, perhaps, you will discover, if your mind is not 
incurably warped by prejudice, that it was the instinct 
of self-preservation that originated the Inquisition. Of 
its abuses I am no more an advocate than you profess 
to be of the persecutions of Catholics by Protestants, 
of which I could draw a harrowing picture from au- 
thentic history. 

But as I write to give useful information to those 
who seek it in sincerity, and not for Mr. Vickers, whom 
many consider unworthy of notice, I must here take oc- 
casion to quote from the latest church history a just 
and truthful appreciation of the origin, object, spirit, 
and operation of the tribunal of the Inquisition. Speak- 
ing of the decree promulgated by Pope Lucius III, in 
the Council of Verona, A. D. 1184, against Western 
Manichseism, at the formal request of the Emperor 
Frederick, the lords of his court, and Christian rulers, 
Darras (Ch. Hist, vol. 3, pp. 233 and 234) says: "Both 
the principle and the action of the Inquisition have been 
deeply calumniated by writers hostile to the Church. It 
has been described as, in principle, an encroachment of 
the spiritual power, upholding by armed force the teach- 
ings which concern only the conscience and spiritual rule. 
Its action has been taxed with a refinement of cruelty 
truly barbarous, and altogether unheard of in the treat- 
ment of other crimes. The hour of justice has at length 
arrived, and these odious charges have vanished before 
the deeper and more impartial study of historic facts. 
The Church, clothed in the middle ages with a protec- 
tive power, was, in duty, bound to guard public order 
and the peace of society, equally threatened by the her- 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL's REPLY. 159 

etics, whose blows were aimed both at civil and religious 
institutions. A w T eak indulgence at such a moment would 
have proved the Church false to its mission and unworthy 
of the people's confidence. As a spiritual society, using 
first but spiritual weapons against the enemies of order 
and religion, when her censures were disregarded, at the 
formal request of the emperors and princes of Christen- 
dom, she gave up to civil justice the rebels she could not 
subdue. Insurrection, at the present time, falls within 
the jurisdiction of civil courts alone. In the middle ages 
the guilty parties enjoyed the guarantee of two jurisdic- 
tions ; they fell under the hand of civil justice only when 
they had cast off the merciful intervention of the Church. 
Time has swept away, in its course, the public law of the 
middle ages ; who shall say that humanity has gained by 
the change ? The sentences decreed by the Inquisition 
were, indeed, uttered by a civil tribunal. In form, they 
were such as accorded with the criminal law of the age. 
Personally we may be moved to pity by the fate of the 
unfortunate wretches who suffered at a period when civil 
discord gave birth to scenes of horror unknown even to 
the ages of barbarism. But inflexible history, the ac- 
complice of no party, rejecting all a priori systems, bears 
unquestionable witness that the punishments of the In- 
quisition were those inflicted by every tribunal for other 
crimes. Can we forget that the torture was not abolished 
in France until the reign of the martyr-king Louis XVI? 
It might not be too w T ide of the truth to say that the pe- 
riod which is most ready to weep over the cruel fate of 
criminals is that in which crime stalks abroad most fre- 
quent and most unharmed. Under one name or another, 
the Inquisition necessarily exists in every community that 



160 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

seeks its own preservation. A community can exist only 
inasmuch as it watches and punishes all who plot or who 
attempt its overthrow. But in the middle ages the fun- 
damental law of society was the Catholic faith. This 
law took precedence of every other. He who was not a 
Catholic, was not a citizen. The Church, then, by pro- 
tecting its faith, upheld social order, secured the peace 
of kingdoms, and defended the supreme law of civiliza- 
tion." 

Sixteenth expectoration. De Faller. I know not such 
an author. This is Mr. Vickers' bad spelling or igno- 
rance. The author of the " Biographie Universelle " is 
not named De Faller, but De Feller, and he is more re- 
liable in his account of Bruno, or Bruni, than the inven- 
tor or inventors of the story about Catholics in Cincin- 
nati being forbidden to read the Bible. 

Seventeenth expectoration. Luther and Bacon acquired 
not — the one his biblical learning, the other his science, 
in the schools of the Church ! Where else did Luther 
acquire his learning ? You answer, he was taught He- 
brew by a Jew. But Luther was, a long time, a Catho- 
lic, a novice, and for fifteen years an Augustinian monk 
in his convent before he escaped, if you will, " like a crim- 
inal from a penitentiary." He confesses that all that long 
time he was a good and faithful religious. Then who, in 
a convent, supplied him with a professor of Hebrew and 
of other branches of study ? The Church, or those whom 
she had commissioned to teach and to rule the monas- 
tery ? You falsely assert that Hebrew was a forbidden 
study. Not in St. Jerome's day, not in Luther's, or in 
any other's. Reuchlin, nicknamed Smoke, as you have 
been Fortune-teller or Gypsy, and I Porcellos (and this 



ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S REPLY. 161 

name was given to one of the ancients for a noble exploit, 
and not by prophecy to me because I was destined to be 
Bishop of Porkopolis), studied in the Catholic schools of 
Germany, France, and Italy, and became an eminently 
learned man in one of the Dark Ages. In Rome he trans- 
lated a passage of Thucydides for Argyrophilus, pronoun- 
cing the Greek with an accent so pure, that his teacher, 
with a sigh, exclaimed, "Ghrcecia nostra in exillo transvo- 
lavit Aipes" Notwithstanding the advantage taken of his 
disputes with some of the school-men to make him em- 
brace the errors of Luther, he rejected those advances, and 
died happily in the communion of the Catholic Church, 
at Hutgart, in 1522, aged sixty-seven years. Thus he is 
none of yours, and I see not why, spider-like, you suck 
poison where others find honey. 

Eighteenth expectoration. That oath. You get it 
from our own standard works, even the Baltimore Coun- 
cils published in America, where the Pope knows we sol- 
emnly and truly swear to support the constitution, which, 
I say again and again, with no apprehension of conse- 
quences such as your morbid or malignant brain conjures 
up, thank God, allows no persecution for conscience 5 sake. 
Do not seek to thrust down our throats a theory or a prac- 
tice that we abhor. Our life is before the world. You 
reproach us with calumnies; we answer with facts. You 
flung a wanton insult into the faces of all orthodox Chris- 
tians, proving yourself as much of a persecutor as you 
dared be, in a public address. But for this you would, 
in all probability, have never heard from me, who, as far 
as I am aware, have never seen, and who do not know 
you. I waste no midnight oil in answering you ; your 
gas would afford light enough, if I required it. II n' y a 
11 



162 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

de qiioi. I now close with an advice to you from the Bi- 
ble (the Vulgate), for I prefer this sacred to profane quo- 
tation (Ps. 33, in our version) : "Prohibe linguam tuam a 
malo : et labia tua ne loquantur dolum. Diverte a malo et 
fac bonum. Inquire pacem et persequere earn " — pursue, 
not persecute it. 

J. B. PUECELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



rogues' gallery. 163 



EOGUES' GALLEEY. 

(From the Catholic Telegraph, January 8, 1867.) 

We learn that a Rogues' Gallery of a certain num- 
ber of the most noted individuals that, from the elev- 
enth to the eighteenth century, advocated the spoliation 
of Catholic churches, priests, and institutions, will be 
exhibited by competent showmen, behind and before the 
scenes, in Hopkins' Hall, for twenty-one successive Sun- 
day evenings. To give the portraits light and shade, 
the good Catholics, Christopher Columbus, Copernicus, 
and Galileo, are to be grouped on the same canvas with 
the malefactors, Arnold of Brescia, John Huss, Wick- 
liffe, Martin Luther, and others ejusdem farince. Our 
criticisms on the pictures as they appear will give 
spiciness to the columns of the Catholic Telegraph, which 
has considerably increased its subscription list by the 
scoring given in it to Rev. Thomas Vickers. We know 
the names of the Apellas who are helping Thomas. 



164 THE VICKRES AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



ARNOLD OF BRESCIA. 

SUBJECT OF REV. MR. VICKERS' FIRST LECTURE AT HOP- 
KINS' HALL-REVIEWED BY ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

[In the Catholic Telegraph, of January 15, 1868.] 

We said in the last issue of this paper, that a rogues' 
gallery was opened in Hopkins' Hall, and that for twen- 
ty-one successive Sunday evenings their photographs 
were to be exhibited by a showman, or showmen. The 
first of the series was Arnold of Brescia, a disciple of 
Abeiard, immortalized by Pope and Eloise. In the 
eleventh century, represented with scandalous effrontery 
by Rev. Thomas Vickers, as an age of utter darkness, in 
which an extinguisher was placed on the human mind, 
and free thought was interdicted and unknown, this 
famous teacher had at his free lectures five thousand 
scholars. While yet a layman, he was the doctor, a la 
mode, in Paris, where his head being turned by his vanity 
and popularity, his heart became the prey of licentious 
desires, and he was cruelly deprived of his manhood for 
a shameful intrigue with Eloise, niece of Fulbert, canon 
of Paris. Having, like Mr. Vickers, wrong notions on the 
Trinity, which he defended in a book published for that 
purpose, the treatise was condemned by the Council of 
Soissons, at which St. Bernard assisted, in 1121. Abeiard 
appealed to the Pope, and was proceeding to Rome, to 



ARNOLD OF BRESCIA. 165 

prosecute his appeal, when Peter, the venerable abbot of 
Cluny, induced him to enter the monastery, and success- 
fully labored at the double conversion of his mind and 
heart. Abelard took the monastic habit, and his subse- 
quent conduct, to his death, and his Letters to Eloise, who 
was then a penitent at the Paraclete, satisfactorily proved 
the sincerity of his conversion. Halving become infirm 
he was recommended a change of air, and went to the 
Monastery of St. Marcellus, at Chalons-sur-Saone, where 
he died happily, at the age of sixty -three years, in 1142. 

From a letter w T ritten by the abbot to Eloise -we learn 
the interesting particulars of the penitence and the oc- 
cupation of Abelard for the two years he passed at 
Cluny. After highly commending the piety and erudi- 
tion of the abbess, he says of Abelard : " I do not rec- 
ollect to have ever seen any one equal to him in hu- 
mility of dress and manner. I obliged him to take the 
first place in our monastic, community, but he preferred 
the last. In the processions in which, according to cus- 
tom, he walked immediately before me, I could not help 
admiring the voluntary abasement of a man so highly 
extolled for learning and talents. He was constantly 
engaged in study and prayer, and observed continual 
silence, unless when forced to speak in the conferences 
and sermons wdiich he delivered to the community. He 
frequently offered the Holy Sacrifice, and even every 
day after I had obtained his pardon from the Holy See. 
In fine, his time was employed in meditating and teach- 
ing the truths of religion and philosophy. 

At St. Marcellus, one of the most healthy and beau- 
tiful places in Burgundy, whither I had sent him for 
change of air, he continued his studies and exercises of 



166 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

piety, until confined to his bed by his last illness. All 
the religious of that monastery are witnesses to the de- 
votion with which he made first, his confession of faith, 
and, next, the confession of his sins, and with what avid- 
ity he received the Holy Viaticum." 

This edifying portion of Abelard's life is passed over 
by Mr. Vickers with his characteristic reticence, his 
shameful suppression of whatever might tend to the 
honor of a Catholic, or the Church. "Abelard," he 
summarily tells us, "journeyed to Rome, and died on 
the way." 

" Among the thousands," says Mr. Vickers, " who had 
sat at his (Abelard's) feet, was Arnold." He imitated 
Abelard in his errors; he did not imitate him in his 
repentance. St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
had chosen the words of Isaiah, " If ye believe not, ye 
shall not be established." Abelard chose the words, 
"He who believes quickly is of weak understanding." 
Now, every Catholic is prepared to admit this as an 
axiom : He who believes quickly, without knowledge, 
without prayer for heavenly guidance, without sufficient 
investigation, without knowing his catechism, which is 
so assiduously taught in Catholic schools and to con- 
verts coming to the Church " is of weak understand- 
ing." But mark the commentary and the bad faith of 
Mr. Vickers. " He means by this that a man can be- 
lieve only what he understands." Ah! Mr. Vickers, 
your creed is short enough already, but it will be shorter 
if you believe only what you can understand. Do you 
understand God ? Yet you believe in him. What 
mysteries in the Divine being, his eternal existence, 
his immensity and simplicity, his presence in all places 



ARNOLD OF BRESCIA. 167 

and in every place at once, his mercy and his unchange- 
ableness. If you understood all of God you would be 
God yourself. As well may you pretend to inclose all 
the air of heaven, the universe, in your hand, as to com- 
prehend in your little mind the nature and attributes 
of God. Do you understand the phenomena of your 
own existence, how soul and body were formed, how 
they came to be united, how they act in wonderful ac- 
cord? No, sir, affect not to throw dust in the eyes of 
your hearers. It will not dishonor your intellect or 
theirs to confess that there are things innumerable, from 
the star to the hyssop, which man can not understand, 
but which he believes. So Abelard confessed, and so 
did even Arnold, for either must have, like you, abjured 
his reason to disbelieve them. 

Arnold was not long content with holding false theo- 
ries. He reduced them to practice. Condemned in the 
General Council of Lateran, in 1139, he took up his 
abode in Zurich, and infected Switzerland with his errors. 
These consisted in the rejection of the sacrifice of the 
mass, prayers for the dead, pedobaptism and the ven- 
eration of the Cross. He recommended (and for this 
he is entitled to his place of first in the Rogues' Gal- 
lery) the spoliation of all ecclesiastics, popes, cardinals, 
monasteries, priests of every degree, and of property. 
With these avowed principles he returned to Rome 
where he excited a most formidable sedition, caused the 
pillaging of the palaces of the cardinals, the assault in 
which Gerard, cardinal priest of the title of Saint Pu- 
dentiana, was dangerously wounded as he was proceed- 
ing along the Via Sacra to see the Pope, and was prob- 
ably the cause of the expulsion of the Holy Father 



1G8 THE TICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

himself from Rome. Nicholas Breakspeare, the only 
English Pope (Adrian IV), was then elevated to this 
dignity, in virtue of the Catholic principle which throws 
open the highest office in her gift to merit when discov- 
ered in the most humbly born. 

"Arnold's doctrines were finally carried to the Eter- 
nal City and at last she sanctioned them." So speaks 
Mr. Vickers. But how did she sanction them? By the 
expulsion of the Pope ; by the burning and plundering 
of sanctuaries ; by bloodshed and sedition, in which she 
was excited to a momentary, phrenzy by the innovator. 
But at length the senators, unable longer to resist the 
entreaties of both clergy and people, made their submis- 
sion to the Sovereign Pontiff, in St. Peter's Church, 
swearing on the holy Gospels to expel Arnold of Bres- 
cia and his adherents from the city and territory of 
Eome; and they kept their word. Frederick Barba- 
rossa had Arnold arrested and delivered up to the Ro- 
man Prefect, whom Arnold had had deposed by the mob, 
and by him he was condemned to death for his crimes, 
in 1155. 

Writers hostile to the Catholic Church, as Darras well 
Observes, may seek to invest the forerunner of modern 
revolutionists with the halo of martyrdom in the cause 
of freedom. He aimed at the overthrow of society and 
order; he fell in the name and by the sword of order 
and society. When such a man becomes the patron 
saint of a lecturer, when a disturber of the public peace, 
a violent disorganizer, is exhibited as a light to the 
world, it is the devil that holds the candle. 

Mosheim, who, like Mr. Vickers, is always ready to 
canonize whoever is an enemy to the Catholic faith, says 



ARNOLD OF BRESCIA. 169 

(untruly) that Arnold was a man of immense erudition, 
but of a turbulent and impetuous character. That his 
principles were reprehensible only inasmuch as he car- 
ried them too far and executed them with a degree of 
vehemence which was as criminal as it was imprudent; 
and he falsely adds that he was crucified. This sensa- 
tional circumstance, Mr. Vickers has the merit of not 
repeating. His punishment w T as bad enough, but it w T as 
according to the barbarous spirit of the age, such as was 
elsewhere meted out to the treasonable and the seditious. 
Mr. Vickers, who, in his lectures and communications 
shows the fiercest spirit of the tribe of persecutors of 
former times, pretends that Garibaldi was not, any more 
than Arnold, deserving of death for his invasion of the 
States of the Church and the profanation of churches 
and altars. Does he then consider that Booth, the mur- 
derer of President Lincoln, and the assassins of Mr. 
Seward, unjustly perished? 



170 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



WICKLIFFE. 

SUBJECT OF REV. THOMAS VICKERS' SECOND LECTURE AT 
HOPKINS' HALL— REVIEWED BY ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(In the Catholic Telegraph, of January 22, 186S.) 

The lecturer, as we find him reported in the Commer- 
cial, of January 6th, began with devotional exercises. It 
is evident that during these and after them, he was nei- 
ther overly devout nor particularly self-possessed, for his 
opening sentences betray a singular incoherency. Here 
they are, textually : "About the time of Edward III, John 
Wickliffe was born. Little is known of John WicklifiVs 
history till he is found a student of Oxford. It is gener- 
ally agreed that he was born in 1324." Now, in the name 
of lucidus ordo, why begin by telling us he was born about 
the time of Edward III, and then, after an intercalary sen- 
tence, coming back, gravely, if not comically, to state that 
by general agreement he was born in 1324 ? But this was 
only a pardonable confusion of ideas. 

When it suits the purpose of the lecturer, he forgets what 
he had said of the unredeemed darkness of the middle 
ages, and extols the learning that shone through the fab- 
ulous gloom. "He very early," says Mr. Vickers, "made 
his name famous as one thoroughly versed in all the learn- 
ing of those times — famous among the distinguished men 
who were educated in the celebrated (Merton) college." 



WICKLIFFE. 171 

And he qualifies Wickliffe's reply to the pamphlet of an 
anonymous monk, on a certain alleged Papal usurpation, 
as " a powerful production." It strikes us that the lec- 
turer's memory or his consistency is here sadly at fault, 
and that thoughtful hearers must have marveled how all 
this learning and that crowd of distinguished men and 
scholars could have issued from the bosom of such deep 
Cimmerian darkness. 

An irrepressible smile will grace the reader's, or the 
hearer's, features at the next piece of " interesting and 
instructive" information vouchsafed by the lecturer, 
when, coming to the written or oral lectures of Wick- 
liffe, he proclaims that "God himself follows the right 
because it is right," and that "moral laws are immuta- 
ble." If this be not bathos, we know not where else to 
seek it. If Oxford men at that day could have taught 
no better, we should have had reason to exclaim, in the 
witty sarcasm of Mrs. Siddons, at a late period 

"Oxford no more; now Cowford be thy name, 
Since thou hast produced such calves — to thy eternal shame." 

Without enlightening his audience as to the distinc- 
tive errors or theories of Wickliffe, he tells us he was 
condemned by the University of Oxford, and that the 
Pope, to whom he had appealed, issued a bull declar- 
ing his doctrine heretical, so that he withdrew to his 
parish at Lutterworth, where he spent his days in re- 
tirement and in writing defenses of his doctrines. 

Wickliffe opposed the doctrine of Transubstantiation ; 
but, nevertheless, he was struck with apoplexy, during 
the celebration of Mass, on Innocents' (Holy Innocents') 
day, 1385, and so finished his career. 



172 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY, 

The infidel historian Hume seems to have known 
more than Eev. Mr. Vickers of WieklifFe's errors. " He 
had the honor/' says Mr. Hume, "of being the first to 
call in .question the doctrines which had universally- 
passed as certain and undisputed for so many ages. 
They were nearly the same with those propagated in 
the sixteenth century." What better vindication of the 
truth of the Catholic Church — what better refutation of 
the falsehoood of the reformed, deformed innovations — 
could the hand of the infidel have penned ? 

Truthful and impartial history teaches us that Wick- 
liffe changed his creed because he had been thwarted 
in his ambitious projects — first, as to the rectorship of 
Queen's College, Oxford, and, secondly, in his aspira- 
tions to an Episcopal mitre. He then began to declaim 
against the temporal and spiritual power of the Pope, 
against the benefices of -the clergy, without, however, 
surrendering his own; that auricular confession was su- 
perfluous and unnecessary; that it could not be proved 
from the Gospel that Christ had instituted the Mass ; 
that a bishop or a priest in mortal sin could not val- 
idly baptize, ordain, or consecrate; to which he added 
many other propositions, subversive alike of civil order 
and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. From the pestilential 
seed thus sown broadcast by the herald of free thought 
in the fourteenth century sprang the Lollards, whose 
paternity is candidly, or compulsorily, assigned by Mr. 
Vickers to Wickliffe. His patron was the Duke of Lan- 
caster, John of Gaunt. His pupils were the itinerant 
preachers of sedition, John Ball, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, 
Tom Millar, and the hundred thousand insurgents col- 
lected from the rabble of London and its environs, who, 



WICKLIFFE. 173 

in the name of the primitive equality and natural rights 
of ail men — for 

"When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then a gentleman?" — 

plundered the goods and burned the houses of the rich, 
the sober, the industrious, the thrifty, until the Duke of 
Lancaster was ashamed of his protege, and the strong 
arm of the law, hastening to the defense of good gov- 
ernment, society, and order, crushed out the insurrec- 
tion. A seventy-four-gun ship might have floated in 
the blood shed by the followers of Wickliffe in those 
fearful upheavings of all the w r orst elements of mis- 
guided and degraded humanity. But this was a thou- 
sand times better than to have shut up WicklifFe in a 
monastery, where he could have done no evil ! Perhaps 
Mr. Dickens, when he visits Cincinnati, may be pre- 
vailed upon by a committee to favor us with a read- 
ing of his own inimitable description of the Lord John 
Gordon riots as an illustration of that instigated by 
Wickliffe. 



174 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



THIRD POETRAIT IN THE ROGUES' GAL- 
LERY AT HOPKINS' HALL. 

REVIEWED BY ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(In the Catholic Telegraph, of January 29, 1868.) 

The man who would judge correctly of historic 
scenes and actors in by-gone ages must, if he would not 
deceive himself and others, and do injustice to the past, 
thoroughly understand the condition of society, the laws 
and usages, the principles and habits of thought, that 
were prevalent in those ages. It is owing to an un- 
pardonable disregard of this rule of equity and common 
sense that the Church and the legislation of the medi- 
aeval age are so often misrepresented. 

In the first centuries of the Christian era, paganism 
was identified with all that was oppressive, unjust, and 
cruel to the followers of the true religion. And the 
followers of Christ had scarcely overthrown idolatry, 
when they had to encounter the hostility of the Arian 
emperors, the Iconoclasts, the Mohammedans ; to these 
succeeded the various forms of persecution of sound doc- 
trine, excited by the subsequent heresies, the Albigenses, 
the Cathari, the poor men of Lyons, or Puritans, and all 
that host of seditious and sanguinary sects, whose name 
is legion, which taught that churchmen had not the 
same civil rights as others, and that these, as well as 
kings, princes, and civil rulers of every degree forfeited 



THIRD PORTRAIT IN ROGUES' GALLERY. 175 

their authority when they were falsely, or not, accused 
of having fallen into mortal sin. These were the teach- 
ings of the Wickliffites, the Lollards, the Hussites, by 
them bequeathed to their successors, the innovators of 
the sixteenth century, which filled a large portion of 
Germany with ruins and threatened, if unchecked in 
their impious career, the very existence of society. 

That we do not exaggerate in speaking of the errors 
of Huss and Jerome of Prague in this connection, we 
here refer to the four propositions by them advanced 
before the Council of Constance: " 1st. The Church is a 
mystical body, of which Christ is the head; of this 
Church the just and predestined are the only members, 
to the exclusion of sinners and the reprobate. Since 
no one who has been predestined (no matter what his 
merits or demerits) can be lost, no member (no matter 
what his vices or his errors) can be separated from the 
body of the Church ; excommunication, therefore, does 
not exclude from eternal life. Besides, the Pope and the 
bishops not being empowered to make the distinction 
(which these audacious sectarians assumed) between 
the elect and the reprobate, the Church would not cease 
to subsist even if there were neither Pope nor bishops. 
2d. Every action of a virtuous man is good ; every ac- 
tion of a sinner is bad ; hence civil and religious officers 
lose their respective authority by the commission of 
mortal sin, in which case revolt is a duty and a right. 
3d. Jesus Christ alone has the power to bind and to 
loose ; this power he did not delegate to the apostles or 
their successors. 4th. The Scripture is the only rule of 
faith and conduct. It is radically contrary to the Scrip- 
ture to restrict the right to preach the Gospel." 



176 THE VICKRES AND PUKCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Church history vindicates the Council of Constance 
from the charge of having violated the safe conduct 
granted to the Bohemian reformers by the Emperor Sig- 
ismund. In granting it he had no intention of exempt- 
ing them from obedience to the decrees of the Council. 
It was meant to protect them on their journey, and 
while they remained, unheard, in Constance ; during 
this period they were perfectly free. But when they 
had got a hearing at the bar of the Council, and en- 
joyed full liberty to defend their opinions, and these 
opinions were refuted and condemned, but unretracted, 
their obstinacy changed their position, and made them 
amenable, as the open and avowed enemies of religion 
and society, to the penal legislation then in force. " The 
philanthropic wail/' says Darras, "raised by Luther- 
anism, and the Voltairian school, over their deserv 
fate, had been more fittingly uttered over the wretched 
victims of Hussite errors and the innocent blood which 
they so plentifully shed." But while the civil and eccle- 
siastical legislation of the age was charged to protect an 
essentially Christian and Catholic society, and to regard 
whatever tended to weaken the faith, or to undermine 
its foundation, as a crime of high treason against that 
society, the Catholic Church, or the ecclesiastical k 
lation, must not be left alone to answer for what was 
not looked upon as excessive punishment, or for what 
was executed only by the civil ruler. As St. Angus- 
tine, Aquinas, and all the councils had so often decid 
the punishment of public crimes belongs immediately in 
spirit lad matters to the ecclesiastical tribunals ; in tem- 
poral concerns, to the civil magistrates. The one brands 
erroneous theories with the particular censure they de- 



THIRD PORTRAIT IN ROGUES* GALLERY. 177 

serve; the other inflicts penalties on crimes against the 
laws of the land. 

Now, when in its fifteenth session the Council had 
condemned the following proposition as subversive of 
faith and morals, viz. : "A tyrant can and ought, law- 
fully and meritoriously, to be killed by any vassal or 
subject, even by stratagem and deceit, notwithstanding 
any obligation of an oath or covenant made with said 
tyrant, and this without waiting for the command or 
sentence of any judge whatsoever," and Huss refused 
audaciously, in presence of the Emperor, the King of 
Hungary and the other princes and prelates, to retract 
the same, glorying, like Booth in the "sic semper tyran- 
nis" and proceeded further to call Wickliffe a saint, 
and asserted that his followers ought, in imitation of 
Moses, to resort to the use of arms, against the enemies 
of the truth, Sigismund declared that Huss had come 
to Constance with a letter of protection from himself, 
and that he had promised to procure him a public trial. 
That the same had now had an impartial hearing, and 
herewith his own pledged royal word had been re- 
deemed. That if Huss would submit to the Council, 
he would treat him w T ith clemency ; but in case he re- 
mained obstinate in his heresy, he (the Emperor) would 
be " the first to lead him to the wood-pile." This state- 
ment is made on the express authority of Professor 
Hefele, the celebrated author of the History of the 
Councils (Conciliengeschichte). Palacky, the famous 
Bohemian historian, remarks that this declaration of the 
Emperor immensely provoked the Bohemians, because 
the Emperor thus incited the Council against him ; and 
we have the further testimony of an eye-witness, at the 
12 



178 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

handing over of Huss to the secular power (Reichenthal, 
then canon of Constance), that the deputies of the synod 
prayed our lord the King and the secular court not to 
put Huss to death, but to spare his life and shut him 
up in perpetual imprisonment. As much is said by a 
later Zwinglian chronicler, John Stumpf. It is thus 
that the Catholic Church, as represented by the Coun- 
cil, is vindicated from the charge of having violated the 
safe conduct of the heretic murderer, or of having con- 
signed him to the death which his iniquities provoked. 
We might add much more from the sanguinary annals 
of the disciples and successors of Huss, Procopius, and 
Zisca, but let this do for the present. 

And now a few words on the inconsistencies and the 
self-contradictions of the lecturer, and his involuntary 
defense of the conduct of the Church and the Council. 
" Huss/' he tells us, " before his appearance at Constance, 
had been cut off by excommunication from all inter- 
course with his fellow-citizens, and had gone into retire- 
ment, supported, of course, by the consciousness of his 
immaculate innocence and orthodoxy." And yet, in the 
next sentence, he lets us see him "preaching from town 
to toivn, in the woods and in the open fields" Again, he 
informs us that " while the hereditary enemy of the Chris- 
tian religion (the Mohammedan) ivas aiming to crush the 
Christian Church and State, Huss resisted to the utmost 
the preaching of the crusade, denying the right of the 
Church to make war for any cause" Moreover, " No in- 
telligence," he says, "could have been more welcome to 
Huss than that a council of the Universal Church would 
be convened at Constance;" and no sooner is this said, 
than Huss is represented as refusing, when invited, to ap- 



THIRD PORTRAIT IN ROGUES' GALLERY. 179 

pear before it Finally, the lecturer, after deriving all 
hie information from the enemies of the Catholic Church, 
one of whom is, doubtless, the infidel Professor Schenkel, 
of Heidelberg, leaves his hearers completely in the dark 
as to whether Huss was justly, or unjustly, accused of 
saying there "were four persons in the Godhead, and 
that he, Huss, was one of them ! " Indeed, from the con- 
nection in which the statement is found, it appears that 
the lecturer regards it as true. For the information of 
our readers we here insert a connected and truthful ac- 
count of Huss and the Hussites from "Bell's Wander- 
ings of the Human Intellect : " 

Hussites — followers of John Huss and of Jerome of 
Prague. They were both condemned to the stake and 
executed, at Constance, for their seditious opinions, in 
1415. Huss, deeply tainted with the doctrines of Wick- 
liffe, taught that the Church consisted exclusively of 
the just and predestinate — reprobates and sinners, ac- 
cording to him, making no part of this society. Hence 
he conclued that a bad pope, for instance, was no longer 
the Vicar of Jesus Christ ; that bishops and priests, liv- 
ing in a state of sin, forfeited, of course, all claim to 
jurisdiction and ministerial power. This doctrine he 
extends even to the persons of civil magistrates and 
princes. "Those that are vicious and govern ill," he 
says, " are, ipso facto, stripped of all authority." Vast 
numbers adopted his sentiments in Bohemia and Mo- 
ravia. 

The consequences of such pernicious tenets are obvi- 
ous : the moment any subject establishes himself judge 
of the conduct of his superiors, as well spiritual as 
temporal, and that it appears to him exceptionable, he 



180 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

has nothing to do but rise in arms to effect their ex 
tirpation. 

Thus did this pretender to reform, under the specious 
plea of opposing the abuses to which the authority of 
the Roman Pontiffs, sometimes carried to excess, gave 
occasion, aim a mortal blow at the very vitals of all 
subordination in Church and State. He held that Chris- 
tians were not obliged to obey their prelates but when 
their orders appeared to themselves reasonable and just; 
that their rule of faith was Scripture alone ; with othei 
doctrinal innovations, since adopted by the Protestants. 
From the censures of the Archbishop of Prague and ot 
the Pope he appealed to the General Council of Con- 
stance ; to which the King of Bohemia commanded him 
to give an account of his doctrine, after first obtaining 
for him of the Emperor Sigismund a promise of a free 
and safe passage through his dominions, on his way to 
Constance, as well as on his return from the Council, 
provided he should be there found orthodox, or retract 
his errors. Huss, on the contrary, obstinately refused 
to obey the Council, and continued openly to dissemi- 
nate his seditious principles. For this treasonable and 
inflammatory conduct he was — by the civil magistrate 
of Constance, and not by the Council — sentenced to the 
flames. Neither the emperor nor the Council on this 
occasion did any thing inconsistent with good faith. 
The Council condemned his errors, and left to the em- 
peror the part of inflicting on the criminal the punish- 
ment awarded by the law ; and the emperor did no 
more than avenge his own cause and that of every 
crowned head in directing him to be legally punished 
when found guilty and pertinacious in his treasonable 



THIRD PORTRAIT IN ROGUES' GALLERY. 181 

maxims. This is a right inalienable in all sovereigns, 
and it is an absurdity to imagine that Sigisniund ever 
had the most distant idea of despoiling himself of it. 

Mosheim, the great advocate and admirer of John 
Huss, himself acknowledges that the declaration which 
he made against the infallibility of the Catholic Church 
was sufficient to entitle him to the epithet of false teacher. 
Was, then, the Catholic Church to alter its belief, in or- 
der, with consistency, to absolve a person of that descrip- 
tion? Mosheim again allows (Hist. Eccles.) that the 
Hussites of Bohemia rebelled against the Emperor Sigis- 
mund after he became their lawful sovereign, and chose 
to take up arms rather than submit to the decrees of the 
Council of Constance, pretending that Huss had been 
condemned unjustly. Was it then in character for an 
ignorant banditti, as they certainly were, to undertake 
to decide, as judges, what was orthodox doctrine, and 
what not? They did not long agree even among them- 
selves, and soon formed two independent parties — the 
one denominated Calixtins, because they insisted upon 
being allowed the privilege of the chalice at Commun- 
ion, requiring, moreover, that the clergy should imitate 
the conduct of the apostles, and that mortal sins should 
be punished in a manner apportioned to their enormity ; 
the other party was called Thaborites, from a mountain 
in the vicinity of Prague, which they fortified, and to 
which they gave the name of Thabor. These were more 
fanatical than the former, and carried their pretensions 
still farther. Primitive simplicity, the abolition of the 
Papal authority, the absolute change of the form of 
worship, and the conceit of having none to preside over 
their society but Jesus Christ in person, who, they said, 



182 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

was about personally to revisit the earth, with a flam- 
beau in one hand, and a sword in the other, in order to 
extirpate heresy and to purify his Church. To this class 
of Hussites, exclusively, Mosheim wishes to ascribe all 
the acts of cruelty and barbarity commited in Bohemia 
during the course of a bloody war which lasted sixteen 
years. "But," he observes, "it is difficult to decide 
whether the Hussites or the Catholics pushed their 
excesses to greater lengths/' Let us suppose it, for a 
moment: The Hussites, at least, were the aggressors — - 
they did not await the martyrdom of John Huss before 
they exercised their outrages upon the Catholics; and, 
though there might exist abuses in the Church, a troop 
of ignorant fanatics, surely, were not the fittest instru- 
ments to reform them. Mosheim admits that their max- 
ims were abominable, and that from such men it was not 
natural to expect any thing save acts of cruelty and 
injustice. 

In the year 1433, the fathers of the Council of Basil 
succeeded in reconciling the Calixtins to the Catholic 
Church, and indulged them in the use of the cup at 
the Sacred Communion. The Thaborites, on the con- 
trary, remained incorrigible; though Mosheim tells us 
that, on this occasion, for the first time, they began to 
examine into the grounds of their religion, and to give 
to it a reasonable form. It was, indeed, high time 
they should do so, after sixteen years of blood and car- 
nage. These reformed sectarians of John Huss now took 
the name of Brethren of Bohemia, and were also called 
Picards, or rather Begards : they espoused the cause of 
Luther when he commenced reformer, and were his pre- 
cursors before they became his disciples. Hence we may 



THIRD PORTRAIT IN ROGUES' GALLERY. 183 

account for that partiality which Protestants have al- 
ways shown in favor of the Hussites. Of this so glori- 
ous an alliance Catholics do not envy them the honor. 
1. It is granted by the Protestants that these their fel- 
low-brethren in Christ were influenced — not by their 
zeal for religion, but by a blind and furious fanaticism, 
since they never thought of any plan of worship before 
the lapse of sixteen years, at least, after the death of 
their protomartyr Huss ! 2. Mosheim has not conde- 
scended to inform the world in what consisted that pre- 
tended reasonable religion which so naturally formed a 
coalition with Protestantism. Indeed, that a religion, 
orthodox in its principles and rational in its creed, 
should have been the work of a frantic and infuriated 
rabble, is somewhat paradoxical. Luther himself had 
sucked in from the writings of Wickliffe and John Huss, 
not only his heterodox opinions, but also those sangui- 
nary maxims which disgrace his own writings, and re- 
newed in Germany, through the instrumentality of the 
Anabaptists, a part of the horrid scenes of blood and 
devastation, of which the Hussites had already set the 
example in Bohemia. 

J. B. PUKCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati, 



184 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



KEV. THOMAS VICKEES. 

(From the Catholic Telegraph, January 8, 1868.) 

The undersigned, at the instance of many inquirers 
and friends, has resolved to publish, in book form, his 
letters to Rev. Thomas Vickers. This he shall do as 
soon as Thomas has gone through a few more of his 
" interesting and instructive " lectures at Hopkins' Hall. 
Meantime, Thomas has not ventured to give the names 
of the Catholics who, to his personal knowledge, are 
forbidden to read the Bible. He was charged with de- 
liberate falsehood if these names were not forthcoming, 
and to this day, after weeks of expectancy, they are — 
Thomas knows why — kept in abeyance. 

Again : when Archbishop Purcell quoted the Latin 
vulgate (Ps. xxxiii : 15), to prove that the word per- 
sequere had the signification of pursue, not persecute, 
Thomas has since somewhere defied the Archbishop to 
cite any classical author who gave the word in any 
other sense than that of persecuting. Well, here are 
quotations from the classics enough to satisfy the fas- 
tidious. The easiest mode of settling this little contro- 
versy is to open Anthon's Latin and English Dictionary 
at the word "persequor." The first meaning there given 
is, "to follow; come after; to follow or pursue eagerly 
or perseveringly. ,, " Quemadmodum simus Hortensium 



REV. THOMAS VICKERS. 185 

ipsius vestigiis persecuti;" "persequi omnes vias" (Cic.) 
— to try all means; to seek delight in any thing; "ali- 
cujus rei oblectamenta ; voluptates" (Cic.) — to follow up 
or practice a trade, profession, or art; "persequi artes" 
(Cic.) — to observe, follow, or pursue regularity, order; 
" persequi ordinem " (Cic.) — to adopt, to study a certain 
doctrine, attach one's self to a school ; " academiam ve- 
terem persequamur " (Cic.) — to pursue; that is, defend 
one's rights by law ; " a persequi bona sua lite et judi- 
cio" (Cic.) — to collect money, wills, deeds, or auto- 
graphs; "persequi hereditates et syngraphas" (Cic.) — 
to take down a discourse in writing, short-hand or sten- 
ography ; "persequi celeritate scribendi, quae dicuntur" 
(Cic.) — to lead a poor life; "persequi vitam inopem" 
(Cic.) — to keep or accomplish commands; "mea man- 
data persequere " — to use diligence, smartness ; " perse- 
qui sollertiam" — to survey or take a retrospect of past 
days ; " persequere dies " (Cic.) — to explain, describe, 
narrate, treat of any thing; "persequi aliquid versibus, 
scrip tura" (Cic.) — to treat of one's life; "de alicujus 
vita persequi." 

Has Thomas blushed in pursuing this record ? Is he 
ashamed of his falsehoods* or only rusty ? 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



186 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



REV. MR. VICKERS' FOURTH LECTURE, 

REVIEWED BY ARCHBISHOP PURCELL. 

(In the Catholic Telegraph, of February 26, 1S68.) 

The Cincinnati Gazette, of 3d inst., treats us to a 
brief analysis of the lecture at Hopkins' Hall, Febru- 
ary 2d. Subject — Guttenberg, the inventor of printing. 

A deal of extraneous, if not wholly irrelevant, matter 
was introduced to fill up the time, such as the rise of 
the Free Cities, the Hanseatic League, the overthrow of 
Feudalism by the merchants, the revival of Letters, and 
like forces — all, be it remembered, in Catholic times, all 
showing the prodigious activity of the Catholic mind, as 
testified to by these facts and the acknowledgment of 
such men as Emerson, Carlyle, Maitland, Hal lam, and 
even Rev. Mr. Vickers himself, who tells us "the pro- 
ductions of the press increased rapidly" — but the lec- 
turer is at special pains to hide from view the part 
taken by Catholic popes, bishops, priests, Benedictine 
monasteries and others, in multiptying, by the works 
they patronized or published, the " unbounded astonish- 
ment and wonder in Europe." He does not tell us that 
the first fruit of the joint labors of Guttenberg, Faust, 
and his son-in-law Schsefer, was "Durandi Rationale 
Divinorum officiorum," a book of Catholic prayers, in 
1459. 

He suppresses the truth that the press was employed 



SAVONAROLA. 187 

to publish the Bible in the vernacular language of Ger- 
many, before the birth of Luther — of which I have one 
or two copies in my library; he is reticent as to the 
number of Bibles in various languages of Europe and 
of Asia, Polyglotts, etc. — Ximenes' among the rest — so 
early given to the world by Catholic priests and Cath- 
olic enterprise. All he has to say is that " it liberated 
science from the power of the priesthood" — an utter- 
ance which scholars will say came with an ill grace 
after such splendid facts in that connection. For these 
shortcomings the only penance w T e w T ould impose on the 
vapid lecturer would be the privilege, which myself and 
a few ignorant priests were allowed, last Thursday, to 
behold the magnificent collection of MS. and printed 
Bibles, Psalteries, Missals, Breviaries, Dantes, and Fol- 
lowings of Christ, with which our public-spirited fellow- 
citizen, Mr. Probasco, has endowed one of the precincts 
of the Queen City. There would the Eev. Mr. Vickers, 
if a single spark of the " Mens divinior " remain unex- 
tinguished in his bosom, fall on his knees and smite his 
breast in shame and sorrow for having basely traduced 
the Catholic Church and priesthood. 

Fifth and Sixth Lectures — Subject, Savanarola. This 
is Mr. Vickers' orthography. It should be Savonarola. 

The lecturer may first tell his story; then let the 
truth of history be heard. 

Savonarola was born at Ferrara, on September 21st, 
1452. In his youth, his favorite studies were Aristotle, 
Aquinas, and Plato (pretty good for a beginning in that 
dark age). At the age of twenty-three he entered a 
Dominican convent, as lay brother, in Bologna ; and the 
lecturer tells us — no news — that it is impossible to say 



188 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

how much unrequited love had to do with his choice.* 
He was appointed (of course by the ignorant monks, to 
deepen the ignorance of the people) lecturer in Natural 
Philosophy and Metaphysics. "About" 1490 he came 
(went) to Florence. There he found the prelates (how 
many prelates in one city?) had no care of their flocks, 
priests were given to avarice, the monks were licentious, 
the women devoted to vanity, and the soldiers to vice 
and crime." In Rome, at that time, the lecturer makes 
him find that the vice of licentiousness prevailed, partic- 
ularly among the priests, and that there were more than 
the four hundred houses of ill repute recently reported 
by the Cincinnati police "at this side of the Rhine," in 
that city. For these and other exaggerated statements, 
the lecturer leads not his hearers to the polluted and 
polluting sources, other than his own mind, from which 
they were derived. It is owing to the disgust of his 
hearers, rather than to bad weather, that the lecturer has 
been lately speaking to rather empty benches. This is 
creditable to the gentlemen, but particularly to the ladies. 

In his sixth lecture, he says of Savonarola: "Plebian 
in his public appointments, he kindled a jealousy among 
the Patricians." Now this Plebian must be an instance 
of a new style of orthography peculiar to the lecturer ; 
whereas the phrase "plebian in his public appoint- 
ments" baffles comprehension. 

Whatever it does mean, we can not discover w T hy it 
kindled the jealousy of the Patricians. We do not see 
in any of the historians we have consulted, such as 
Fleury, Wetzer, and Welte, De Feller, etc., that the Pope 
ever offered Savonarola a cardinal's hat, and thus gave 

*A gratuitous inuendo of Mr. Vickers, unsupported by history. 



SAVONAROLA. 189 

him occasion to make use of the smart saying, that he 
would never wear one unless dyed in his own blood.* 
Pic de la Mirandole, "nephew of his uncle/' might have 
indulged in this, or any other extravagance in his hero- 
worship. But the haughty monk was no favorite with 
Alexander VI, whose excommunication he despised. 

Like Sejanus, in Pagan Rome, the idol of the popu- 
lace to-day may be the outlaw of their fury to-morrow. 
The Florentine mob idolized Savonarola at one time, 
they execrated him at another. He was accused of 
heresy by the Cordeliers, or Franciscans, and defended 
by his brethren, the Jacobins, or Dominicans. The pro- 
posed ordeal by fire, in which Savonarola was quite will- 
ing that one of the Dominicians should figure instead 
of himself, having proved a failure, Fra Hieronymo was 
put to the torture. During the " question " he confessed, 
after it he retracted, and Mr. Vickers acknowledges, not- 
withstanding the love of truth, for which he says he was 
remarkable in his youth, that he declared he would, if 
put on the rack, " confess and retract indefinitely." No 
wonder that the lecturer imitates his saint in this partic- 
ular by placing to the account of the sainted De Arbues an 
hundred thousand martyrs, more or less ! Finally, Savo- 
narola, with two of his fanatical companions, was con- 
demned to the gallows, and, after their execution, their 
bodies were consumed with fire and the ashes thrown 
into the Arno. After this account of Brother Jerome 
by Rev. Mr. Vickers, with my own running comment- 
ary, I now present the following highly interesting and 
authentic sketch of his career, related by Darras in his 

"The offer of a cardinal's hat rests on the authority of his ad- 
mirer, the Dominican author of the "Homines Illustres," &c, who 
says a Dominican bishop told the Dominican legate to ask this 
favor from the Pope for Savonarola. 



190 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

Ecclesiastical History. With this and other Catholic his- 
torians, I deplore the pride that impelled Savonarola to 
his ruin ; and I regard his fate as a warning to all who 
indulge to excess in their denunciation of the vices of 
their fellow-men, whether historical or cotemporary, and 
who are inconsistent enough to violate the laws which 
they had themselves established and sworn to obey. 

1st N. B. Will Rev. Mr. Vickers confess his inexcus- 
able ignorance in quoting Tertullian against the Roman 
supremacy in a book, u JDe prccscr'qrtione haireticorum" f 
whereas he never wrote a book with such a title. This 
is an absurd and palpable blunder of the lecturer. 

2d N. B. Will the reader and the Rev. Paul Mohr, 
Bantam, of Clermont County, the indorser of Mr. Vick- 
ers, look to the latter's book (pp. 38, 81) where he 
makes the tardy confession of his having attributed to 
Aquinas, as reproached by Archbishop Pur cell, words 
which are not to be found in Aquinas. "Oh," says 
Mr. Vickers, "J did not pretend to give the exact words' 1 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 

21. Florence had, meanwhile, been made the scene 
of events, perhaps without example in human annals. 
They have conferred its celebrity upon the name of Je- 
rome Savonarola. Jerome was a Dominican monk and 
prior of the Convent of St. Mark. He seemed to have 
been destined for the retreat of the cloister, where his 
austerity and fervor were the edification of his religious 
brethren. But Fra Girolamo had received the danger- 
ous endowment of genius, and his virtue was, unhappily, 
too weak to bear the splendid gift. Savonarola was un- 



SAVONAROLA. 191 

known ; he was placed in the pulpit, and his eloquence 
won him a power which met and overcame that of the 
princely Medici, When Charles VIII had entered Flor- 
ence, he demanded from the citizens one hundred and 
twenty thousand gold crowns, which he needed to con- 
tinue his campaign. Twenty-four hours were allowed 
to collect the sum. The required amount could not be 
raised, and the irritated monarch threatened to destroy 
the city. The terrified inhabitants hastened to the cell 
of the Dominican monk. "I will go to the king," said 
Jerome, who had repeatedly w T arned the people, for more 
than a year past, that God was about to punish their 
crimes by giving them up to the power of the French. 
Savonarola appeared at the palace gates, but was re- 
fused admittance ; he persevered in his efforts, and was 
at length led before the king. Drawing a crucifix from 
beneath his religious habit and holding it up before 
Charles, he exclaimed, " Prince, do you know this sign ? 
It is the image of Christ, who died on the cross for you, 
and for me, and for all of us, and w T ho, with his last 
breath, implored pardon for his murderers. If you will 
not hear me, you will at least hear him who speaks by 
my mouth, the King of kings, who gives victory to faith- 
ful princes, who casts down the wicked. Unless you re- 
nounce your cruel design of destroying this wretched city, 
the tears of so many guiltless victims will plead to heaven 
with a power far different from that of your armies and 
your cannon. What are numbers and strength before 
the Lord ? Moses and Joshua triumphed over their ene- 
mies by prayer ; we, too, will use the arms of prayer, if 
you will not relent. Prince, will you be merciful ? " The 
monk, as he spoke, held up before the king the image of 



192 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

the Crucified Redeemer. Charles was overcome, and 
abandoned his fatal project. His impassioned eloquence 
was always a most powerful weapon in the hands of the 
religious, and Savonarola soon found another occasion to 
try its efficacy. The Medici were driven from Florence 
by a popular revolution ; a new form of government was 
to be established, and the Dominican prior was called 
upon to frame it. Retiring for a few days from the pul- 
pit, he set himself to his new task and drew up a con- 
stitution on the plan of the Venetian. It was read by 
him, in the cathedral, before the magistrates and the 
people; and, from that moment, the monk was at once 
priest, magistrate, judge, and lawgiver. He used his 
boundless influence only for the greater glory of God, 
w T ith results which, at the present day, may seem in- 
credible. By his order, eight pyramids were erected in 
the public square, and upon them were promiscuously 
piled dangerous books, indecent ornaments, dice, cards, 
and other instruments of vice ; the whole was then given 
to the flames. All the citizens were present at this hol- 
ocaust of the sensual w r orld, offered up to the God of 
penance and mortification. 

22. So far Savonarola had shown himself worthy of 
his high renown; but the Spirit of God, which animated 
the first period of his life, seemed to have withdrawn its 
guidance from the second. An instant sufficed to dis- 
per, like a light cloud, all the prestige which had at- 
tended his name. The constitution given by him to 
the Florentines decreed, among other articles, that ev- 
ery citizen condemned for a political fault should have 
the right to appeal to the great council of the nation. 
Five conspirators, who had been arrested and con- 



SAVONAROLA. 193 

demned to capital punishment, availed themselves of 
the new law and appealed to the grand council. Sa- 
vonarola opposed the appeal, and they were executed. 
The general indignation broke out into a fearful storm. 
The religious replied only by invectives hurled from 
the pulpit, not only against vices, but against individ- 
uals. The Roman court, the Pope, and the cardinals 
were all included in his sweeping denunciations. The 
secular clergy withdrew their support, the people gave 
free rein to their fury, and a thousand arms were raised 
to tear down the idol of yesterday. From all sides arose 
a demand for prompt and just satisfaction. The judg- 
ment of the important case was left to Alexander VI. 
The Pope enjoined silence in the matter until sentence 
should have been pronounced upon the culprit, who 
was, at the same time, requested to appear in Rome 
to explain and justify his conduct. Savonarola re- 
fused, and continued his furious harangues. A second 
and a third admonition, likewise unheeded, were followed 
by a sentence of excommunication, publicly read in all 
the churches in Florence. The proud reformer had re- 
jected the advances of mercy, laughed at the thunders 
of the Church, persisted in his sacrilegious preaching, 
and now stood in open revolt against the supreme head 
of the Christian world. The schismatic was tried be- 
fore the tribunal of the Archbishop of Florence; Sa- 
vonarola suffered death, after having made his confes- 
sion and received the body of the Savior, with the 
plenary indulgence, in articulo mortis, sent by the Pope, 
A. D. 1498. Thus perished one of the most splendid 
intellects of the fifteenth century — a victim of his own 

ungovernable pride. 
13 



194 THE TICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 



KEVIEW. 

Having concluded all that I thought it necessary to 
write in answer to the charges brought against the Cath- 
olic Church — her claims, her teachings, and her spirit- 
by Rev. Mr. Vickers, I had resolved to add no more, 
until I had seen two addresses in which the gentleman 
uncoiled himself, on the 26th of April and 10th of May, 
in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, to the full extent of his 
serpentine proportions. From these effusions, as I find 
them in the Indianapolis Sentinel and the Cincinnati 
Dally Times, I propose to make a few extracts, that the 
Christian reader may see the condition of an infidelized 
mind. The autopsy will furnish the best refutation of 
the reviler's theories, his vain assumptions, and his ar- 
rogant denunciations of ecclesiasticism and the Bible. 

In his sermon of the 26th of April, the preacher, who, 
like a man traveling on a rail car, thinks the whole world 
is moving in his direction, tells us that the "old creeds 
are breaking up ; " and that " what has hitherto been re- 
garded as essential to ecclesiastical life is rapidly losing, 
or has already lost, its hold on the minds of the people." 
We have no doubt that Mr. V. indulges in this illusion. 
The wish is father to the thought, and the only proof that 
facts will warrant for the rash assertion. Now, in the 
name of all that is just, and truthful, and rational, we ask 
him where in Cincinnati, where the progress of the Cath- 



REVIEW OF MR. VICKERS' SERMONS. 195 

olic faith has been, and is, so marvelous ; where in Bos- 
ton, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, St. 
Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, Mobile, Milwaukee, is the 
evidence that the Catholic faith is retrograding in the 
number of its worshipers, its churches, its institutions 
of learning, its hospitals, asylums, orphanages ? Where 
in the old world — in Ireland, England, France, Ger- 
many, or New Australia — do we discover the "decay 
of faith ;" "faith in a state of eclipse;" the "suspense of 
faith/' which Mr. V., through Protestant spectacles, sees 
all around, and from which he tells us Protestantism, 
" though shut up to the use of fraud in one or the other 
of its Protean forms," does not hesitate to use all the 
resources in its power to rescue? The Catholic Church 
has no need to resort to such expedients ; the evil des- 
ignated exists not in her borders. She steadily contin- 
ues, not only in undiminished, but in constantly-increas- 
ing numbers, conquering and to conquer, on her road to 
heaven. He that sees this not is blind ; he that asserts 
the contrary does not speak the truth. 

Again, the Ishmaelite tells us that ecclesiasticism, 
whether it be "Jewish, Eoman Catholic, Protestant, or 
only Unitarian, is always intolerant. It annihilated 
(and here it is, in Mr. Vickers' sense, but another name 
for God) the Canaanites, it crucified Jesus, it stoned Ste- 
phen to death, it founded the inquisition, it burned Ser- 
vetus, it drove the Puritans out of England, it hanged 
Mary Dyer on Boston Commons, it prayed God to put 
a hook into the jaws of Theodore Parker while living, 
and after his death it declared, from an Unitarian pul- 
pit (as if in the very delirium of intolerance and mean- 
ness), that he did not accept the conditions of salvation." 



196 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

In the same strain he says (falsely, at least, as far as the 
Catholic Church is concerned) that " belief, or mere intel- 
lectual assent, without piety or morality, is made to take 
the place of life ; so that he who believes in the dogmas 
of the Church, the total depravity of human nature, a 
personal devil, and an eternal hell, the incarnation of 
God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the atone- 
ment through his death on the cross, and other such ab- 
surdities, has complied with the essential conditions of 
salvation." That intellectual assent was not made by 
the Church the all-sufficient condition of salvation, we 
have Mr. Vickers' acknowledgment ; for he tells us in the 
opening sentence of his sermon of the 10th of May, for- 
getting or contradicting what he had said on the 26th 
of April, that the Church had " peterized Paul and paul- 
inized Peter. The cry of Peter or Paul, works or faith, 
had changed to the watchword of Peter and Paul, works 
and faith." After this unblushing falsehood, it will excite 
no surprise that he proceeds to the indecency of saying 
that the free Spirit is dispensed through an ecclesiastical 
bellows, and that it is said no man can live unless he 
keep the nozzle "in his mouth." This reminds me of 
the vulgarity of the Voltairian wit regarding the proph- 
et's breakfast, so effectually retorted on the cynic in the 
Jewish Letters by the Abbe Guenee, and the infidel Tay- 
lor's suggestion, in England, fifty years ago, that " they 
were the swine into which the devils entered, and not the 
Lamb, that took away the sins of the world." It almost 
provokes me to say that Mr. Vickers' self-abasing follow- 
ers derive their inspiration from him. 

" Ou le dos 
Perd ser nom." 



REVIEW OF MR. VICKERS' SERMONS. 197 

In his sermon of the 10th of May, he makes Christ, 
and Peter (who he says never was in Rome, whereas our 
old convert-friend, Judge Mitchel, after a thorough study 
of history, truly says the " Chair of Peter is as clear in 
Rome as the throne of the Caesars "), and Clement, Li- 
nus, and Anacletus all fictitious persons ; that the power 
given to the apostles to " bind and loose/' as recorded in 
the Gospels, was put into his mouth by the evangelists, 
but never uttered ; that " the belief in God and the devil 
are both creations of fancy." And yet (who could believe 
if he were not himself the witness ?) Mr. Vickers is con- 
strained, in the same sermon, to neutralize much of his 
injustice to the Catholic Church by confessing that she 
has fulfilled a great mission : " She carried the Christian 
view of life and Christian civilization to nations who 
could get hold of the spiritual essence of Christianity 
only through imagination and faith ; she proclaimed the 
equality of all men before God ; and whatever miracles she 
did not work, she performed the greatest miracles of self- 
sacrificing love and mercy. She brought about a great 
unity of man in faith ; she attempted, in a rude way, to 
put the fundamental thought of Christianity into life : 
that the Spirit is supreme, and the eternal more than 
the temporal. It was this thought that gave rise to the 
profound consciousness of sin, upon which her whole 
scheme of life is based. Man's chief, only care, is to 
save his soul. The Church contained an infinity, a 
miraculous world of love, and an ineffable treasury of 
spiritual life." Here the devil again lays hold on Mr. 
Vickers, and I refuse to copy the words that follow in 
in the sermon. 

I have some hope that Mr. Vickers, who is still a 



198 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

young man, will discover the error of his ways and for- 
get the an ti christian lessons which the infidel professors 
of Heidelberg have taught him. With all his anti-eccle- 
siastical, anti-social theorizing, I think I still discover 
traces of a higher nature and a better spirit, originally 
given him by God, and for a nobler purpose than that 
to which his life and intellect are now misapplied. To 
help him to this emancipation from the fetters that bind 
him to a false mission, we devote the remainder of the 
space which the "signature/' as the printers call it, al- 
lows us, to the beautiful and truthful testimony to the 
Catholic Church by Mr. Dix, a non-Catholic, of Massa- 
chusetts, and commend it, at parting, to Rev. Mr. Vick- 
ers and all who seek the saving truth. 

J. B. PURCELL, 

Archbishop of Cincinnati. 

"Beauty and order being the same thing, and relig- 
ious truth being the beauty of holiness, Christ, who was 
truth in person, must have made his Church the friend 
and upholder of all beauty and order; and so it has 
proved for eighteen hundred years. The Church has 
been the celestial crucible in which whatever of human 
art or invention had within it the essential attributes 
of higher and spiritual goodness has been purified and 
adapted to the service of religion. Has poetry sought 
to please the imaginations of men ? the Church of Christ 
unfolded before her the annals of Christianity, with her 
grand central sacrifice of infinite love, and all her dem- 
onstrations of heroic suffering and courageous faith ; and 
poetry drew holier inspiration from the view, and incited 
men, by higher motives, to a higher life. Have painting 



DIX ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 199 

and sculpture sought to represent objects of refining 
grace and sublimity? the Church of Christ persuaded 
them to look into the records of the Christian past, 
and there they found treasures of beauty and splendor, 
devotion and martyrdom, whose wealth of illustration 
as examples, incentives, and memorials, art has not ex- 
hausted for ceuturies, and will never exhaust. Chris- 
tian history is the inexhaustible quarry of whatever is 
most noble and heroic in man, purified by the grace of 
God. Has architecture sought to invest stone with 
the attributes of spiritual and intellectual grace? the 
Church of God has so portrayed before her the sub- 
limities of the Christian faith that she knelt at her 
feet in veneration, and thenceforth consecrated herself 
to build enduring structures, w T hich, the more they 
show of human power and skill, the more they per- 
suade men to the worship of God. Has eloquence 
sought to nerve men for the grand conflicts of life? 
the Church of Christ has touched the lips of eloquence 
with living fire from her altar, until have sprung forth 
words that flamed with love to man and love to God. 
Has music sought to w r eave her entrancing spells around 
the heart and soul ? the Church of Christ has breathed 
into music her own divine being, until the music of the 
Church seems like beatific worship, and worship on earth 
like beatific music. 

"As in these respects, so in others, the Church has 
made a holy conquest of whatever is noblest among 
the endowments of men. In speaking of Catholic his- 
tory, even from the secular point of view, it may be 
justly said that nowhere else has there been such won- 
derful discernment of the various capacities of the hu- 



200 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

man mind, and of their various adaptations. Tenacious 
of the truth and of all its prerogatives, the Catholic 
Church has, nevertheless, allowed a wide liberty of 
thought. That the Catholic Church has narrowed the 
understandings of men, is a singular charge to make 
in the face of the schools of Catholic philosophy, in 
which men of varying mental structure, training, or 
habits of thought, have had full, free play of their 
faculties. And where else have there been so many 
free and varying activities as in the Catholic Church? 
The false charge that the Church fetters the minds and 
movements of men may be traced to the fact that all 
Catholic diversities of thought have converged, like 
different rays of light, in the elucidation of truth; and 
that varying modes of Catholic action have had one 
object — the advancement of truth. 

"Here is the intended force of all these illustrations, 
for they have had a logical purpose. The world will 
never outgrow the Church. All the boasted improve- 
ments in science, in art, in civilization, so far from im- 
peding the Church of Christ, and making her existence 
no longer needed, will, at the same time, advance her 
power, and make her more needed than ever. If in 
the middle ages, when society was in the process of 
transition from the old to the new, the Church was 
preeminently needed to keep w T hat was just and right 
and true in the older forms of civilization, and gradu- 
ally to adapt to them what was just and right and true 
in the newer developments of society, most truly is the 
Church needed now, w^hen there exists a perfect chaos 
of opinions, and when a part of the civilized world is 
in another transition, from the aimless, rudderless va- 



DIX ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 201 

garies of Protestantism to the solid rock of Catholicity. 
If ever the voice of authority was needed, like the voice 
of the angel of God, heard amid and above the howl- 
ings of the storm, it is needed now. 

" Much false reasoning has been uttered about the ' un- 
changeable Church/ as though, because 'unchangeable/ 
it was not adapted to a changing and striving world, 
w 7 hen, in truth, for the very reason that the Church of 
Christ is unchangeably true, she is required and adapted 
for all the changes and emergencies of time. Who ever 
heard a sailor complain of the mariner's compass, be- 
cause, on account of its unchangeable obstinacy, it would 
not conform to his private judgments and caprices about 
the right course? No one. It is for the very reason 
that the mariner's compass is unchangeably true to 
the eternal law of magnetic attraction, under all cir- 
cumstances, and in all places, that it is the unerring 
guide among the whirlwinds and heavings of the great 
deep. Catholicity is the mariner's compass upon a 
greater deep — even that of the wild and rolling, beat- 
ing ocean of humanity, pointing, amid sunny calms, or 
gentle winds, or raging gales, unerringly to the cross 
of Jesus Christ, as the needle of the mariner's compass 
points to the north — guiding, age after age, her pre- 
cious freight of immortal souls to the harbor of infinite 
and unending joy. 

" The force of this illustration is all the stronger that 
the mariner's compass is a human adaptation of an im- 
mutable law of nature to navigation, w^hile the Church 
of the living God is divine alike in origin and appli- 
cation, and has existed from the beginning, unchange- 
able, like God himself, yet adapting herself to the wants 



202 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

of every age. The Church of God is like his own in- 
finite providence, in which unchangeable truth meets 
in the harmony of mercy the innumerable changes of 
human need. 

"Much has been written, and more said, about 'the 
church of the future/ as though it were to be some 
millennial manifestation altogether different from the 
historic church ; but the church of the future which is 
not also the church of the past and of the present can 
be no church ; for a true church must reach to the ages 
back as to those before. If the continuity is broken, 
truth is broken, and can not be restored. As for eigh- 
teen centuries there have been no forms of civil society, 
no calms or tempests in the moral, political, social, or 
religious world, in which the Catholic Church has not 
been true to the organic principles of her divine life, 
even the enemy of Catholicity should admit — that fact 
being granted — that the presumption is on her side that 
she w r ill be equally true to those principles during the 
centuries that are to come. He may deny that the 
Church has been true, and, consequently, that she will 
be true, but he will not admit one proposition and 
deny the other ; he will admit both, or deny both ; in 
other words, he will admit, equally with the friend of 
Catholicity, the identity of the Church, past, present, 
and to come. Now, it will be impossible for a friend 
or enemy of the Catholic Church, from her beginning 
to this very day, to point to an hour when she was not a 
living Church. It is, then, probable that she will con- 
tinue to be a living Church. But where, since the pro- 
mulgation of Christianity to this time, has existed a body 
of Christian believers which, for the quality of continual 



DIX ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 203 

existence, has so good a right to be called the Church of 
Christ as the Catholic Church? Considering her num- 
bers, extent, and duration, that church has been pre- 
eminently the church of the past ; considering numbers, 
extent, and duration, that church is preeminently the 
church of the present; considering all analogies and 
probabilities, then the Catholic Church will be preem- 
inently the church of the future. 

" In truth, the vindictive anger of the enemies of the 
Catholic Church, in whatever form of opposition it may 
be shown, proceeds from the fact, not that ste is the 
dead church of the past, as she is sometimes called, for 
there would be no reason to war with the dead, but be- 
cause she is, as she has been and will be, the living 
church. The Catholic Church is hated, not for being 
too dead, but for being too living. She has seen the 
birth and death of countless 'improvements' of her 
principles, and has received with gladness into her fold 
many an eager and conscientious inquirer for the 'new 
church/ who has at length reached an end of his wan- 
derings and a solution of his doubts in finding, with 
tears of rapturous submission, that the new church, for 
which he was seeking, is the same church which has 
stood for ages — ever old, yet ever new, because repre- 
senting Him who is alike the living God and the An- 
cient of Days. 

"The Catholic Church, so frequently and unjustly 
denounced as ever behind the age, or even as facing 
the past, has been foremost in all parts of the world. 
She has sent her faithful soldiers of the cross where the 
spirit of commerce dared not go ; she was the first in 
the east and the first in the west. It was her lamp of 



204 THE VICKERS AND PURCELL CONTROVERSY. 

divine light which dispelled the gloomy terrors of the 
barbarous north of Europe ; it was her scepter of celes- 
tial beauty which, under the guidance of heaven, trans- 
formed the political and social wreck of southern Eu- 
rope into order. In what part of the world which man 
could reach has she not planted the cross? Where on 
the face of the earth is the mountain whose craggy 
sides have not, at one time or another, sent back into 
the sounding air the echoes of Catholic worship? 

"Daniel Webster gave a vivid picture of the extent 
of the power of England in what I think to be the 
grandest sentence which America has contributed to 
the common treasure of English literature. He said : 

'"The morning drum beat, following the sun, and 
keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily 
with one unbroken strain of the martial airs of Eng- 
land/ 

"That grand figure of speech may be applied to the 
extent of the Catholic Church. Yet it is not by mar- 
tial airs, but by hymns of praise, and penitential ori- 
sons, and the continuous sacrifice that the Catholic 
Church daily celebrates, 'from the rising of the sun 
unto the going down of the same/ the triumphant 
march of the Prince of Peace. How like 'the sound 
of many waters' roll hourly heavenward the anthems 
of Catholic worship throughout the world ! Not only 
is every moment of every day consecrated by Catholic 
hymns sung somewhere on earth, but how majestically 
roll down through eighteen hundred years the unbro- 
ken anthems of Catholic devotion ! Minute after min- 
ute, hour after hour, day after day, night after night, 
month after month, year after year, century after cen- 



DIX ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 205 

tiny, the holy strains go on unending. To the mind's 
ear seem blended in one almost overpowering flood of 
holy harmony the unnumbered voices which have sound- 
ed from the very hour w T hen the shepherds of Bethlehem 
heard the angelic songs to this very moment, when, some- 
where, Catholic voices are chanting praise to the Lord 
and Savior of men." 



THE OHE^IPEST S03STGS- BOOK. 



BUii.uuii nfiUJiJSAXiua b: 

Or, The Catholic Teacher 9 s Companion. Containing 79 Hymns and 
51 Songs, compiled for the use of Catholic Schools, with the approba- 
tion of the Most Rev. J. B. Purceel,, Archbishop of Cincinnati ; Rt. 
Rev. G. A. Carreee, Bishop of Covington ; and Rt. Rev. S. H. Rose- 
Ckans, Bishop of Columbus, O. 
8vo, 94 pages. Price, 35 cents. 



We refer to the remarks made by the Catholic Press. 

THE CATHOLIC TEZEGBAPH, OF CINCINNATI. 

" This work nils a want long felt ; a book intended solely for the 
school-room, combining piety with innocent amusement. With a 
few exceptions, the hymns are old and well known to our Catholic 
youth, and have been selected as well with a view to their simplicity 
and popularity as for their fitness for children's voices. The songs 
are amusing as well as instructive, and will help to relieve the dull 
tedium of school hours. We cordially and earnestly recommend its 
use in our Catholic schools." 

THE CATHOLIC, OF FITTSBTTBG. 

" This is a collection of approved Hymns and popular Songs, set to 
music. It will be found of great use in the school-room, and we think 
our teachers would do well to introduce among their children a taste 
for that study to which this little book is devoted. Our children, 
when at school, could be taught most of the hymns used in the 
offices of the Church. They might also be taught to chant vespers, 
and sing some of the simpler masses used in our choirs. Then why 
is it not done? Would not the acquisition of such a degree of vocal 
music be of use to the children, and a great benefit to priest and 
people? and might not our schools be made to serve as feeders to 
our choirs, which many pastors find it so difficult to organize and 
maintain ? " 

THE CATHOZIC MIKTtOIt, OF BALTIMORE. 

" Our hasty inspection of this little school-book impressed us most 
favorably. It consists of a compilation of Catholic Hymns and the 
Vespers, all arranged with appropriate music. Beside these, there 
are a number of popular melodies appended to the book. It can not 
fail to interest and captivate the young, and make for them a whole- 
some school exercise." 

TELE PILOT, OF BOSTON. 

" This little work contains a selection of Hymns and Songs for the 
use of our schools — week and Sunday-schools — and it is published 
witli the approbation of the Most Rev. J. B. Purcell, Archbishop of 
Cincinnati. The pieces have been selected for the purpose of reliev- 
ing the tedium of long school hours. The idea is good, and we hope 
our teachers of parochial and Sunday-schools will follow it." 



FOB FIBST COMMUNICANTS: 



IHIM @i Wmm^ 



Manual of Prayers and Instructions, especially for the use 
of First Communicants. Compiled by the Sisters of Notre 
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FLOWERS OF PIETY. Selected from approved sources, and 
adapted for general use. 256 pages. 82mo. Cloth, plain, 25 cents ; 
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THE CHRISTIAN'S GUIDE TO HEAVEN". A Manual for 
Catholics ; with the Evening Office of the Church in Latin and 
English. 320 pages. 24mo. Roan, plain, 45 cents; Roan, gilt 
edges, 70 cents; Roan, gilt edges and sides, 90 cents; Morocco, 
$1 55; Velvet, $2 70. 

THE DAILY EXERCISE. Consisting of the Holy Mass and 
Vespers, with Morning and Evening Prayers. To which is added 
a selection of Hymns and Prayers for Confession. 192 pages. 
48mo. Cloth, plain, 18 cents; Roan, gilt edges, 40 cents. 

THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS. A Manual of Instructions and 
Prayers Compiled, from approved sources, by the Sisters of 
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THE HOLY WAY OF THE CROSS. By St. Alphonsus de 
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A DEBATE ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION, 

between Alexander Campbell, of Bethany, Virginia, and the 
Rt. Rev. John B. Purcell, Bishop of Cincinnati. With Preface 
and Appendix. 416 pages. 8mo. Cloth. $1 50. 

THE PATH, which led a Protestant lawyer to the Catholic Church. 
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BENZIGER BROTHERS, 

Printers to ike IToty Apostolic See, 

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